FORMER KPU MEMBER CALLS FOR INTENSIFIED FAMILIARIZATION OF VOTING SYSTEM

Jakarta, Jan 23 (ANTARA) - A former General Elections Commission (KPU) member, Chusnul Mar'iyah, has called for intensified Commission efforts to familiarize the public with the voting system in the 2009 general elections because much of it was new.
Speaking at a discussion on the potentials of the 2009 polls to give rise to complaints from contestants, Mar'iyah said introducing ticking the ballot paper as a new way of giving one's vote was not easy as people had so far been used to punching.
She said although KPU would still accept punched ballot papers as valid votes, the new system would remain be prone to conflicts or complaints.
She said conflicts might also occur during vote counting because of the ignorance of election workers on a vote's validity when the voter concerned had ticked the preferred party symbol, the name or the sequence number of the chosen candidate or all of them.
"What will happen if voters tick only the names and sequence numbers or if they only tick the party symbols. It is not impossible this problem will cause arguments during vote counting because of the workers' ignorance about the regulations," she said.
Therefore, she said, the KPU needed to intensify its efforts to familiarize the public as well as election workers with the election regulations.
On the potential of complaints over the result of the election she said they were likely to be about such things as women's representation and the zipper system.
She said complaints might originate not only from a conflict among political parties but also among candidates belonging to the same party.
She said complaints might also originate from the problem of the legal status of a KPU member as the term of a KPU member would expire when the vote was carried out.
"There is also a case of a KPU member who is also a member of a political party while the regulation is that he or she must be independent. Several KPU members in the regions are political party cadres," she said.
The chairman of the General Elections Supervisory Board (Bawaslu), Nur Hidayat, agreed that in order to minimize compliants familiarization needed to be intensified.
He said Bawaslu was currently holding a national meeting to improve the knowledge of its workers about the general elections regulations.
Bawaslu was also paying attention to the technical aspect of giving vote including the ink to be used. He said all colors had already been claimed by political parties as their colors. "The only color left is the sharp color of the police vest but the ink in that color is very expensive," he said.