Camelia Pasandaran

Chastised KPU Plans New Count System

After the failure of its high-tech quick-count system for the April 9 legislative elections, the General Elections Commission is now considering a new method utilizing the text messaging service of cellular phones.

“We have received a grant from the International Federation for Electoral Systems (IFES) for the new software,” commission member Abdul Aziz said.

For the April elections, the commission, also known as the KPU, used software called Intelligent Character Recognition that works using a scanner.

Local election officials sent the data to the district election commissions, which scanned the results and sent them directly to a data center in Jakarta. By the closing day of the quick-count, however, only about 10 percent of the nation’s votes had been tallied. Manual counting was then relied upon for the official results.

The failure led to an investigation of the KPU by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) after it was revealed that the quick-count system had cost about Rp 20 billion ($2 million).

Aziz said that under the new system, election officials at the polling stations would send the results by text message to a data center in Jakarta.

The public will be able to access the results through the KPU’s Web site.

“We will increase the bandwidth of our servers to prevent the Web site from crashing,” Aziz said.

He said that increasing the bandwidth would be the only cost for the KPU, with the IFES paying for the telecommunication expense. The provider of the text message service is Telkomsel.

“We will use that provider as it has stated that it can cover up to 80 percent of all Indonesian areas,” Aziz said. He said that he hoped the new system would deliver the results faster than the Intelligent Character Recognition system.

“The results can be sent the same day, after the vote-counting process is over,” he said.

Adam Schmidt, chairman of IFES, confirmed his organization had met with the KPU on implementing the system, but said no final decision had been reached . He said the system has been applied for 10 years in many other countries but would need to be adjusted specifically for Indonesia.

“The KPU will implement the program,” Schmidt said. “The system’s success will depend on KPU implementation. We’re just supporting them.”

He also stressed that the use of the system was for the sake of providing people with an early outcome of the vote, but the official and legal result would be from the manual counting of votes.

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