Calculating Politicians

The results are trickling in. Unless the General Elections Commission (KPU) gets a move on, at the current rate of counting, and allowing for a 72% turnout, the final results will be announced in late January 2011. Let's hope the counting rate improves by a factor of 21 so the KPU can meet the 30-day deadline. However the fact that their online results page has been showing the same vote tally since 9:35am on 10 April is perhaps not a good sign. Neither is the fact that the KPU homepage hasn't been updated since the day before polling day. And they haven't managed to organize the service whereby interested voters can obtain the latest results by sending an SMS text message to a special phone number. In fact it's only down to the heroic efforts of news portal detik.com that Pemiloopy is able to track the count at all. Well done guys.

Of course fans of detik.com are able to follow the count, and all the TV stations have the numbers scrolling along the bottom of the screen, but might Pemiloopy venture to point out that the national percentages are not the key figures? To show what I mean, take the "quick count" results from a previous post. If people had voted in these proportions across the nation (yes I know - they didn't), the two parties headed by the ex-generals with dubious human rights records, Gerindra and Hanura, would win no seats at all, despite garnering 4.4% and 3.6% of the vote respectively. Indonesia's voting system, which brilliantly combines the district and proportional representation systems in a way that ensures the disadvantages of both dominate, means that they would win no seats in the first round of counting (where seats are awarded based on the number of seats in the electoral regions), and none in the second (seats awarded on the remainder of the votes). In East Java, where Gerindra fondly hopes to pick up votes from disillusioned fans of Gus Dur, 4.4% (or 5.1% of the valid vote) is not enough to pick up any first round seats, and is only just enough to be in with a chance of second round seats.

So the intriguing possibility now is that despite all that money, Prabowo and Wiranto may have blown it after all.