Well well well, what have we here? Oh my, it’s the “celebration of democracy”, Indonesian-style! This morning from 8 AM till noon, Indonesian citizens who are lucky enough to get into the much-criticized Permanent Voters List a.k.a. DPT –and I really mean lucky like the blessings of a hundred angels smacked right into your face- flocked to local voting booths to cast their votes and hopefully get this country back on the right track. Evidently, the streets were somewhat abandoned until noon when people finished voting; then all Jakarta broke loose to the malls.
I want to be a polite guy; therefore, I believe the General Elections Commission (KPU) deserve some strictly-rudimentary compliments for finally holding the elections on time. That’s it. My compliment is valued roughly the same as your you-look-nice-today comments that you give to people because you just want to be, well, polite.
For what it’s worth, this legislative election is nowhere near perfect. Screw it, I think perfection itself is trying hard to run away from this election. Very sad and depressing, but frustratingly true. Ask your local voting organizer and they will happily confirm that the 2004 elections were far more neatly organized.
As predicted, if registered voters who chose to not vote (colloquially called golput) were to found their own party, they would be one of the biggest fraction in the Parliament, easily beating out mid-size parties. There are various explanations for this phenomenon. First, it has been widely reported –and often denied by KPU- that the DPT is messed up. Ghost voters, dead would-have-been voters, underage voters (whoa, talk about youth involvement!), and the millions of potential voters -first-time and umpteenth-time alike- who were left out of the list. Example: my grandparents, who have been living in the same address for like 50 years and have voted in the 2004 and Jakarta gubernatorial elections. These people are accidental golputs.
Second, there are people who are fazed by the number of parties and candidates competing in the election and by the complexity of the process. Don’t count them with your fingers: there are 38 political parties nationwide, plus another 6 in Aceh. Some field as many as 20ish candidates in each electoral district they enter. That translates to huge ballots which, I might frankly say, look utterly ridiculous. More importantly, it actually deterred people from exercising their right to vote. Third, there are people who doesn’t freakin’ care anymore about the election and wish that Simon Cowell be the next President of Indonesia. OK, I made up the second half of that sentence. These people have lost faith in the power of the election in changing the country; a stance that I myself can understand and we must respect. They are the real golputs, who think that golput is better than being represented by a clown.
No wonder many Jakartans opted to spend the long weekend away from home. Bandung, Bali, and what have they.
The shabby DPT is just one slice in the messed-up-election pie. From what I can gather from a number of news sources, there are obviously problems with campaign violations, logistics, socialization of the new system, vote-buying (including the famous serangan fajar, which is vote-buying in the early hours before the election), and allegations of manipulations to give advantage to a certain party. I’m gonna shut up now since I don’t want to be “visited” by police officers in the near future, or forever for that matter.
Anyway, I hope you, registered voters, have done your patriotic duty to mencontreng, but not mencoblos, your persons or party of choice. We may not think alike, and I just might even hate your choice; but hey, it’s your right to vote for what you believe in. At the end of the day, we all want the best for our beloved Indonesia, don’t we?
One more thing, the DPT issue is not your local voting booth organizers’ fault. KPU and the Ministry of Home Affairs have been shamelessly pointing their fingers to each other as the source of this brouhaha. In my case, the organizers have worked very hard to update the DPT so that it completely lists potential voters; however, their efforts were ignored by officials. In this spirit, I urge you to thank these organizers as they are your very neighbors who have worked hard, despite all the hardship KPU had thrown them, to make sure that this election can run as smoothly as possible.
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