TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Commentary: Running a polling station — How hard could it be?
As running a polling station in the April 17 general election was not all that complicated, the General Elections Commission (KPU) entrusted the job to volunteers, as has been the practice in previous elections
Change Size
A
span>As running a polling station in the April 17 general election was not all that complicated, the General Elections Commission (KPU) entrusted the job to volunteers, as has been the practice in previous elections.
This year, the KPU recruited more than 7.2 million people to help run 810,329 polling stations nationwide. Each was managed by nine ordinary citizens recruited from neighborhoods. The job was simple: administer the votes, count the ballots afterwards and fill out the dozens of forms.
I ran one such station in South Jakarta along with a retired banker, a small-time businessman, a housewife, a young information technology worker, a parking attendant, a house helper and two neighborhood guards.
Though seemingly a simple task, running a polling station carried a huge responsibility requiring diligence. While we knew the rules about who has the right to vote, we were asked to be flexible since some were not registered or did not receive the formal invitation to vote.
There was also the question of integrity. It was important that we not let our political preferences affect how we work. Our neighbors, particularly the official witnesses assigned by political parties to our polling stations, were there to watch over us.
But here’s the catch: Running a polling station was arduous, stressful and time consuming.
On the day, those running the polling stations put in averagely 20 hours of work. We turned up one hour or so before opening the polling stations at 7 a.m., and we were still counting the votes and filling in the forms when most everyone else had gone to sleep.
At my polling station, we finished at 2 a.m. the next day. But upon hearing there was a long line of people from other polling stations trying to deliver the ballot boxes to the local KPU district office, we decided to take a nap first and delivered our boxes at 8 a.m.
It was sad but not all that surprising to hear that many volunteers died of exhaustion. Many of us have not recovered from exhaustion five days later.
Registering the votes and counting the ballots for up to 300 people — the maximum number of voters for each polling station — may not seem like much. But each voter cast up to five ballots for the president/vice president, the House of Representatives, the Regional Representatives Council, the provincial legislative council and the regency/city council, so a polling station could end up registering up to 1,500 ballots.
We had to account for every ballot used, unused and spoilt. We had to ensure the number of votes cast was the same as the number of people who voted. Several polling stations repeated the vote counting because the figures did not match.
We also had to deal with people. Most voters — our neighbors — were pretty easy to administer. But we did get the few difficult cases in which we had to make a decision, in consultation with the polling station supervisor and the official witnesses, to let voters cast their ballots even though they were not registered.
There was a nurse from Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, who works in a South Jakarta hospital and resides in East Jakarta. We would have accommodated her if she had a letter from the hospital stating she was on duty on April 17. Apparently the hospital only gave her that one hour to take leave but no letter. She did not return.
There was the wife of a neighbor with an ID card from Sumatra. She insisted on voting upon producing her electronic ID-card. We turned her away in the absence of the official form, called the A5, stating that she intended to vote at our polling station. The KPU had extended the deadline for people to secure the A5 form up to one week before election day.
But we accommodated five unregistered people who could produce their electronic ID cards, showing that they lived in our district. These were people whom the KPU had, for technical reasons, failed to register. Six voters came with the A5 form.
Work for volunteers began long before April 17. These include registering voters in the neighborhood as long as a year ago. There were four rounds of re-registrations, each time updating the data of voters.
Volunteers were responsible for setting up polling stations that were accessible and convenient for voters, including voters with physical disabilities. The KPU gave Rp 1.6 million (US$106) for logistics, which barely covered the cost of renting a sizeable tent. We scrounged around for chairs and tables, with some of us forking over our own money; some had neighbors’ support.
The KPU gave us a tiny stipend for honorariums and three meals for our work on April 17, but not before cutting it for sales and income taxes, even though we were not selling anything to the KPU, and many volunteers had earnings far below the official taxable income.
Volunteering was never about the money, nor was it ever about helping our preferred candidates or parties win the elections. We barely had time to follow the news about what was happening elsewhere in the country. Most of us were too focused on ensuring that we did our job as best as we could in the short time allotted to us.
We volunteered our time and energy out of our sense of duty to the nation. We were honored and proud to be part of this great project of making democracy work in Indonesia.
____________________
The original version of the above article appeared on thejakartapost.com on April 21.
