Experts predict chaos after April 9 election

Best case, there will be plenty of lawsuits and demands for a revote nationwide. Worst case, there may be violence as people reject the results of next month’s election.

Two political experts sharing their thoughts about the general election with the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club (JFCC) on Wednesday agreed that this year’s poll will be messy and chaotic, with the potential of violence erupting after, rather than before, voting takes place on April 9.

“The Constitutional Court has to be prepared with so many petitions for a revote,” said Chusnul Mar’iyah of the University of Indonesia and a former member of the General Election Commission (KPU).

Chusnul laid the blame squarely on the Court for ordering several local gubernatorial and regency elections, including the last one in East Java in February, to be retaken in response to demands from losing participants.

The Constitutional Court had acted outside its authority of just declaring something as constitutional or not, she said. “It had set a bad precedent that losing parties and candidates in the April 9 election would exploit.”

She also predicted that the KPU would face many lawsuits for failing to communicate well to the political parties about the mechanism of election, particularly in converting votes to seats.

Jeffrey Winters, a senior Indonesianist from the Northwestern University in Illinois, said one area for a major controversy in the aftermath of the election is the voter registry, with claims that the total number being significantly bloated.

Quoting senior Golkar politician Surya Paloh, Winters said if people learned later that the voters’ list had been tampered with in significant ways, “there will be violence”.

A total of 38 political parties are contesting the election nationwide for seats in the House of Representatives and the provincial and regency/mayoralty legislative councils. Voters also cast their ballots for the Regional Representatives Council.

While Indonesia has not had a history of election violence, many people fear this year’s election would be messy for lack of preparations, logistical challenges, budget constraints, and incompetence on the part of the organizers.


The KPU said more than 171 million people have been registered to vote, but the vote registry has of late been the subject of a major controversy.

Complicating the issue is the recent allegation of manipulation of the voter registry following the revelation by former East Java police chief Insp. Gen. Herman Surjadi Sumawiredja that he had been removed from his job last month just as he was discovering fraud in the gubernatorial election.

The national police chief General Bambang Hendarso Danuri has denied that the removal of Herman had anything to do with the investigation of election fraud, and insisted that the police were still continuing with the probe.

The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has since conducted its own investigation into the current updated voter registry in selected regencies in East Java and found that the number of voters have been bloated by as much as 40 percent.

Other parties are joining the PDI-P chorus for more transparency over the voter registry and some going as far as suggesting delaying the vote until after the registry is fixed in a way that satisfied everyone.

The Ministry of Home Affairs and KPU had meanwhile been blaming each other for the gross errors found in the voter registry.

Winters said these errors were too diverse and too frequent to be blamed on some computer glitches, and more indicative of manipulation going on.