Phew!

So it's all over. The Constitutional Court decided the voters (and all the polls, before and after the vote) were right and Megawati and Jusuf Kalla and their running mates with dodgy human rights records lost.

True to past form, Megawati's supporters ran riot, starting fires in the street and causing traffic jams as is their wont whenever Mega fails to become president. Strangely Kompas newspaper failed to report the disturbances - it must have cost the PDIP - Mega's party - a fortune to keep that out of the press. Megawati herself is sulking as usual, and has said nothing beyond a grudging statement that she "understood" the verdict, which given her famously limited intellectual capacity is perhaps the most we could hope for. Her running mate Prabowo must be seething. He put so much money into the campaign (or rather his brother did) and it was all for nothing. Of course there is a chance that Prabowo will try again in 2014.

And that's not really an option for Jusuf Kalla, Megawati or Wiranto, who will be 72, 67 and 67 respectively come the next election. Kalla has said he would go back to his home town if he lost, and Mega has implied she wouldn't try again if defeated. Wiranto might have another go, but voters may scorn a two-time loser (hear that Mega?).

Given that Jusuf Kalla stood on a Golkar Party ticket against President SBY, it's possible there will be no seats for that party in SBY's new cabinet, which is presumably why current Coordinating Minister and mega-tycoon Aburizal Bakrie is frantically trying to get the party chairmanship following Kalla's resignation. After all his Epicentrum construction project is in trouble and he needs a key positon to ensure he has enough clout to keep the creditors at bay....

Meanwhile the head of the incompetent General Elections Commission (KPU), Abdul Hafiz Anshary, has refused to resign, saying that to do so would break the law as Law No. 22/2007 says KPU members only step down if they are sick, die or are fired...

The election may be over (even though the fat lady hasn't sung), but politics continues...

NOT FAIR .. I want to be president!

So SBY won, as predicted. Ex general Subianto Prabowo, who owns 90 horses but has been promoting himself a champion of the poor, and who bought himself a vice-presidential ticket from Megawati Sukarnoputri has not stopped sulking since the opinion polls during the campaign showed he and his has-been sidekick were not managing to bribe their way to popularity. Then came the quick count polls on election day that showed SBY with just over 60%, Mega-Prabowo with around 37% and the joke pairing of Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto on 12%. NOT FAIR - the polls have been fixed, cried the disgraced former general. Then the results started trickling in showing similar figures. Prabowo then accused the Gneeral Election Commission of fixing the results to match the quick count polls, claiming that he had a poll showing very different numbers. And finally the General Elections Commission announced the final result: SBY with just over 60%, Mega-Prabowo with around 37% and the joke pairing of Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto on 12%.

In a sulk, Megafatty and Prabowo refused to attend the announcement of the results - at least Kalla and Wiranto turned up for that - and now both pairs of losers plan to contest the result. What does Prabowo want? The results of the poll he commissioned to be used as the official result, or a rerun of the poll? He'd take the first option if he could and does not seem to realize that he'd lose a rerun because the people are not as stupid as he hopes they are, and would rightly punish him for being such a poor loser. He does of course have Megawati to learn from in that regard. Having failed to be crowned president in 1999, she settled for the number two job until she could work with her former enemies in the military to oust poor old Gus Dur and claim the top job just like Daddy. She then did nothing for three years and was defeated in the 2004 presidential election. She didn't accept that result either and refused to speak to, yet alone congratulate her successor.

So despite the statements that all candidates were prepared to accept victory or defeat, the childish actions of the losers show them to be unfit for the jobs they failed to get. Phew!

Counting...Counting...Gone!

Beginning shortly after the polls closed on April 9, the General Elections Commission's (KPU) website was updated with the latest votes counted for each party nationally. News portal detik.com had their own count, which displayed pretty much the same numbers. For a few days the KPU website was updated almost hourly. Then on April 29 1t 12:39pm the site announced that the updates had stopped with 14,739,196 votes counted . Shortly after that the special website went offline. Then a few days later, on May 5, the detik.com site resumed, with 80,231,512 votes counted. Since than the total has climbed to 100,028, 285 in fits and starts, with an update or two every day.

Meanwhile, on May 4, a new section of the KPU website appeared with detailed election results from the individual electoral regions, of which there are 77. Strangely the results for Aceh showed a vote of 0 for all six of the local parties (Aceh is the only province where local parties were allowed to stand). Pemiloopy was able to save the results as they appeared - the totals were downloadable in PDF. However once the results from three of East Java's 11 electoral regions posted, the updating stopped, and that section of the KPU website has also disappeared. East Java is the province where there were widespread allegations of fraud in the gubernatorial election last year. It is also the stronghold of the divided National Awakening Party and a region where the Gerindra vehicle of disgraced former general Prabowo was hoping to trick farmers into voting for him.

So, with one day remaining for the KPU to announce the final result, as required by Article 201 (1) of the Law No. 10/2008, the earlier transparency has gone, and it is by no means certain the increasingly incompetent Commission will even get this right. We shall see tomorrow...

STOP PRESS: The KPU has said, nay confirmed, that the final results of the elections will be announced at 7:30PM on Saturday May 9, in line with the legally mandated schedule, according to detik.com. Of the 77 electoral regions, the counting has been finished in all but two. The invitations have gone out and all parties will be present for the big event at the KPU building.

Jakarta, we have a problem

As of 11pm today, a week after election day, the General Elections Commission (KPU) has counted eleven million votes from 57,792 polling stations. While this may sound like a splendid effort, these figures are worrying. The problem is that there are 171,265,442 Indonesians who have the right to vote and on election day there were a total of 519,920 polling stations, each with one ballot box (Kompas, 11/4/09 page 2). Each polling station caters for a maximum of 500 voters, as laid down in Article 150 of Indonesia's Law No.10/2008. If the turnout was 100%, then 10% of ballot boxes counted would mean 10% of the maximum possible votes counted. However, while 11.1% of ballot boxes have been opened, the votes counted only amount to 6.5% of the electorate. Assuming this ratio remains consistent, this means the turnout will only be 58.4%. This means something has gone wrong somewhere. Are Indonesians really that disillusioned, or did the KPU make such a mess of the election that millions of Indonesians were deprived of their right to vote? Either way, expect complaints from the (bad) losers.

Meanwhile the count goes on, but the rate the votes are being counted at is actually slowing (as shown in the graph). Tracking the results coming in today at the official General Election Website, at the current rate, they'll need another 10 weeks to finish the job.

So it looks like the KPU are pretty incompetent. Even the president has starting blaming them. However, the 64 million Rupiah question is: was the "incompetence" systematic (favoring one particular party, such as the president's Democratic Party for instance...) or was it just bog-standard incompetence. Indonesia's voters need to know...

Ready, Steady, Campaign!

It all starts tomorrow! The election campaign proper! There is a list of places where parties are allowed to campaign, and anther list of places where they are not. The no-go list includes the Hotel Indonesia roundabout - a traditional location for the my-party-has-more-followers-than-yours rallies. Of course it's all very well to ban gatherings outside the approved venues, but the people who are paid to attend - oops - I mean the devoted party followers, can hardly be expected to arrive one-by-one and wait in orderly lines for admission. This means there will be major congestion near campaign venues (for the major parties anyway - in fact it would be very embarrassing if there was none).

Despite a last minute balls-up with the campaign schedule, once again the General Elections Commission has arranged things so parties who hate each other do not campaign on the same day. Which is another way of telling any party scheduled on the same day as one of the biggies that they don't have much of a chance.

With apologies for the Jakarta-centric nature of this post, here is the schedule for the capital for the major parties (everybody gets two turns):

Tuesday 17 March: Golkar (traditionally generous to attendees)
Wednesday 18 March: United Development Party (PPP) (if anybody remembers who they are)
Friday 20 March: Democrat Party (SBY's lot) (will have to be very discreet if it pays people to attend) & Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) (the holier-than-thou lot, big in the capital)
Saturday 21 March: National Mandate Party (PAN) (if anybody comes...) & Gerindra (with Rp15 billion in funds, they have enough to hand out food, cash and T-shirts to all comers)
Tuesday 24 March: Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) (another rentacrowd party)
Thursday 26 March: Hanura (Wiranto) (also rich, needs to be seen as more popular than the hated Gerindra, so may be generous with the food and cash) & Democrat Party (again)
Saturday 28 March: Golkar (last chance to show they are loved by the people)
Monday 30 March: Prosperous Justice Party (probably will try to turn Jakarta white by bussing in supporters and causing traffic chaos)
Tuesday 31 March: National Mandate Party (farewell fling) & Gerindra (probably still lots of money left - expect a big show)
Saturday 4 April: PDI-P (Could be a biggie as nobody is at work - not that it makes much diference to the unemployed)

Numbers...numbers...

Some surprising numbers have been emerging over the last couple of weeks. And they are important numbers: people and money (in that order).

The General Elections Commission (KPU) is in a bit of a tizzy because the number of voters doesn't add up. The KPU in the centre and its regional offshoots have come up with different totals for the number of voters. In some cases, according to Kompas (19 February 2009) these differences are significant. For example the KPU in Jakarta has decreed that there are 29,294,127 voters in East Java, while that province's KPU says there are 29,524,214 , a difference of 230,087. Meanwhile the figures for Papua are 2,190,516 according to the centre and 2,063,087 according to the Papua KPU, an alarming difference of 5.82%. Clearly these numbers are big enough to make a difference as to who gets elected and who doesn't. Nobody seems quite sure what to do about this. Tempo magazine (3 March 2009) reported that among the problems are duplication of names, nonsensical distribution of genders and fictitious voters. And according to the list for one province, there is a family with more more than 100 members.

And now there are some even more amazing numbers. All parties are obliged to report their assets before the campaign proper starts. Most of them seem to have done, although the election oversight body has accused Megawati's Indonesian Democratic of Struggle of not coming clean. The party's central office chairman Tjahjo Kumolo says this is a lie, an attempt to wreck the image of the party. He doesn't say who by... Anyway, he told detik.com, the party has already provided its account number and initial balance, just not the details yet.

Back to the numbers. Gerindra, the party set up as a vehicle for disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto to grab the presidency, has managed to accumulate Rp15.694 billion. Not bad for a new party - in fact enough to give almost Rp100 to every single voter. At least it explains the non-stop TV ads. In at number two is the Democratic Party, the vehicle established by current president (and former general) Yudhoyono to grab the presidency, with Rp7.027 trillion. And in third place is the People's Conscience Party, a vehicle established by indicted war criminal and former general Wiranto to grab the presidency, with just over Rp5 billion.

You've got to feel sorry for the impoverished also-rans. In last place is the Functional Party of Struggle (these Indonesian party names don't translate very well do they?) with a paltry Rp1,000,000. Just ahead is the Indonesian Justice and Unity Party, with Rp1.38 million. How strange: the Indonesian Justice and Unity Party was also established by a general. Obviously some ex-generals are better at "attracting" funds than others...

Problematic Legislative Candidates

The latest pre-election buzzphrase is 'caleg bermasalah' - legislative candidates with problems. These range from using forged documents to bypass the requirements to stand for election to committing crimes.

According to Indonesian TV station SCTV in a report from 15 October, problems include alleged involvement in crimes (including corruption), faking hospital statements of good health and registering more than once. And that's just from Riau province. The next day, Kompas newspaper reported that in Banyumas, Central Java, the local office of the General Election Commission (KPU) received 14 complaints from the public alleging candidates were involved in mischief including corruption and drug abuse.

On 20 October, news portal detik.com reported that the KPU had received 162 reports of problem candidates, with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, led by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, leading the pack with 26 reports followed by the People's Conscience Party, led by UN-indicted former general Wiranto, with 22. By 21 October this figure had risen to 253, according to a KPU official who went on to say that of these, 13 were involved in legal cases, 13 more faked their academic credentials and a further 43 were suspected of corruption.

However, things do get done. The South Sulawesi KPU has since removed 13 candidates from the list - three were thrown off (one for being nominated by two different parties in two different areas, one for being a civil servant and one for being nominated in two different areas), and 10 resigned. The KPU helpfully explained that being a drinker, stealing electricity or having more than one wife could be used as reasons for throwing people off the list, and that it is investigating cases of apparent fakery of graduation certificates.

STOP PRESS: Detik.com has just reported that Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's founding president, faked her high school graduation certificate to allow her to stand for election. She has since resigned her candidacy to "concentrate on managing her party", meaning the KPU will not go ahead with its plan to report her to the police...

STOP PRESS: The General Elections Commission announced on 28 October that it was removing 72 candidates from the list. 66 of these resigned of their own accord, four were suspected of faking their academic credentials and two turned out be be civil servants. A total of nine candidates have been put forward to replace them.

Numbers...numbers...

It's all about numbers, as the latest bout of fun and games shows.

Firstly, some members of the legislature (DPR) want to revise Law No. 10/2008 on Elections. The problem is that at the moment the order of candidates on the ballot paper will play a major role in determining who is awarded the seats won by the parties. Now some legislators want the seat to go to the candidate with most votes (what an extraordinary idea). This will probably be opposed by those people who have got themselves at the top of the list, by fair means or foul...

And President SBY's Democratic Party seem to be in breach of article 54 of Law No.10/2008, which states that the maximum number of candidates shall be no more than 120% of seats in the legisalture. Kompas newspaper (3/10/08) and General Election Commission (KPU) member Endang Sulastri seem to be a touch confused. According to Kompas, the Democratic Party has 673 candidates, which many people who say that "the maximum number is 120 percent of the totla number of DPR seats (550), namely 672 people."

Step forward Endang, who says "...we have registered and counted 120 percent of the seats in each electoral region [constituency] and the result is 675 candidates, not 120 percent of 550 DPR seats."

A quick check on the calculator shows that 672 is 120 percent of 560, not 550. Why? Because article 21 of Law No. 20/2008 fixes the number of DPR seats at "560 (five hundred and sixty)".

So can "Kompas" and the KPU a) not count or b) not read?

The "My Republi Party" [sic]

The "Partai Republiku" successfully took the General Election Commission (KPU) to court as they wanted to participate in the election. In a rather confusingly worded ruling (and appeal), the judge did not actually make it clear why it should be allowed to. After all, the party failed the verification process by the KPU as it does not have representative offices in enough provinces. More than 66 parties wanted to take part, but in the end, only 38 will do so nationally.

So why so desperate. After all, the "Partai Republiku" doesn't have a hope of winning a significant number of seats, yet alone a majority. Could it have anything to do with the fact that parties will receive state funding? It could indeed!

And in their haste to set up a party, the people behind it couldn't even be bothered to come up with a proper name. In Indonesian, 'republik' means, unsurprisingly, 'republic'. The suffix 'ku' means 'my'. So 'My Republic Party' is 'Partai Republikku', with double k. But 'Partai Republiku' means 'My Republi Party'.

Now what's the indonesian for 'plonker'?

Saving face, saying little

The General Election Commission (KPU) has called off its round-the-world jaunt in the face of a public outcry. Officially it's just been delayed - this is known in these parts as "saving face".

Meanwhile, the official KPU website (www.kpu.or.id) is now rather thin on information. It used to have an English language section, but that has vanished. Also gone, rather mysteriously, are the 2004 election results. The link to map of electoral districts goes to a blank page, and the local Aceh parties don't even get a mention. Anybody wanting information abut the election is advised to stick to this blog :-) or make use of Google. Or if all ease fails, read the Jakarta Post (online at www.thejakartapost.com), although bear in mind that on 11 September this year, it ran an article with the headline "Eight years after 9/11".

Oddities

The fun has started. Party flags are everywhere. Oddities so far:

• The General Elections Commission (KPU) has decided some of its members need to go overseas to tell expat Indonesians (all 1.6 million of them) about the elections. The fact that nobody in Indonesia seems to know much about them is due to the fact that the funds for the overseas jaunt were released first, before the domestic campaign funds...

• After having to let four small (ie insignificant) parties participate in the election, thanks to a lawsuit, the KPU has been ordered by another court to let yet another join in the fun. However, according to the rules, the party in question doesn't actually meet the conditions for qualification. Hmmm. Parties contesting the election get state funding and judges are corrupt. Any connection..?