The Year of Voting Frequently

Late in the evening of 26 July the Indonesian General Elections Commission (KPU) confirmed what had been clear for the past week by announcing the names of the top two candidates in the country's first ever direct presidential election. The result was supposed to be announced by the close of business, but the Commission was forced to delay the determinative meeting after a small package exploded in the women's bathroom on the ground floor of the KPU building. The perpetrator had phoned ahead so the building was empty when the bomb went off, but its location and timing was sufficiently symbolic to ensure a flurry of speculation about the impact it the explosion would have on the future course of the election - the type of speculation the perpetrator presumably craved.

The KPU announced that a former general and security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (invariably known as SBY) had topped the count after receiving 33.57 percent of valid votes cast. SBY's former boss and the incumbent president Megawati Soekarnoputri was the second placed candidate with 26.61 percent of the vote. The announcement marked the likely end of the second of three stages of general elections to determine the nation's president in what is the most complicated and drawn out electoral process in the world.

Indonesian's first went to the polls on 5 April to vote for representatives in national, provincial and district assemblies. Amongst the 24 political parties that contested seats in the national People's Respresentative Assembly (DPR) only five won sufficient legislative seats (3 percent) or garnered enough of the popular vote (5 percent) to nominate a presidential and vice-presidential candidate. Oddly enough these parties were not obliged to nominate candidates from amongst their own ranks. And so on 19 May the KPU announced the following five presidential candidates: the incumbent Megawati, her polygamous Vice-PresidentHamzah Haz, the long time democracy advocate Amien Rais, the retired general and karaoke king Wiranto and the charismatic SBY. Almost two months later on 5 July Indonesians returned to polling booths to select their preferred candidates and 21 days later the aforementioned results were announced. But in a nation of 210 million people, spread amongst a vast archipelago of 16,000 islands, with a long history of corruption and nepotism and a nascent tradition of real democracy, the result was going to prove controversial.

Hamzah, perhaps the subject of significant disapproval after marrying and retaining four different women, only managed to garner 3 percent of votes. Rais, a popular and respected muslim leader, won a suitably respectable 14.66 percent of the vote. Both candidates fell well short of the leaders and following the KPU's announcement both candidates accepted the official result. But the result was not accepted by all and in this case the people's choice did not sit well with some embedded elite - figures from a dark political past who still wielded significant power.

Golkar was the state apparatus through and by which former President Soeharto so effectively and utterly controlled the Indonesian political system from its inception to Soeharto's fall in 1998. While Golkar suffered an expected fall from grace in the first free and fair elections of 1999, in the May 2004 DPR election Golkar won more seats than any other party. This led many to at speculate that, at best, the Indonesian people had a deep dissatisfaction with the new crop of political elites or fear, at worst, a growing desire amongst the population to return to a more predictable form of autocratic rule - the devil they knew. To further add to this consternation, the resurgent Golkar nominated as its presidential candidate the former chief of the armed forces, Gen (ret) Wiranto. The sense of consternation was particularly strong amongst human rights observers in the region because of Wiranto's alleged role in the atrocities committed in East Timor following that former Indonesian province's affirmative referendum for independence. On a ticket with Solahuddin Wahid (the younger brother of the enigmatic former President Abduraman Wahid), Wiranto won 22.15 percent of the popular vote.

Under Indonesian electoral law a canditate must win an outright majority in the first round of elections to be determined as President. Should no candidate win an outright majority, the two candidates who received the greatest number of votes must proceed to a second round of head to head presidential voting (resulting in a third round of general elections) before the President is determined. Although Wiranto's campaign won a sizeable 26,286,788 votes (out of 118,656,868 valid votes cast), his tally proved to be insufficient to carry him into the second round of presidential elections on 20 September. Or so it seemed...

Three days after the KPU's announcement, Wiranto filed a complaint with the newly created Constitutional Court claiming that he had lost 5.4 million votes due to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the vote counting following the 5 July election. Were such a discrepancy to be recognised and the official results adjusted accordingly, Wiranto's tally would rise to approximately 31.6 million - a mere 100,000 more votes than that received by Megawati Soekarnoputri. The numbers involved were tantalisingly convenient to say the least.

In a situation reminicent of the butterfly ballot paper debacle in Florida, multitudes of Indonesian voters had double punched their ballot papers. The presidential ballot paper consisted of printed photographs of each set of presidential and vice-presidential candidates and was of no inconsequential length. For this reason it was presented to voters neatly and conveniently folded. However, an exceedingly high number of voters failed to completely unfold their ballot papers before punching a hole in the head of their preferred candidate. The results can be imagined. When initially inspected, the double punched ballot papers were immediately deemed invalid and many were thrown away. But when the KPU became aware of the extent of the problem they issued an urgent circular deeming double perforated ballots valid if the puncture passed through only one set of candidates heads - a state from which the voter's intent could be determined with sufficient accuracy and a situation that mercifully avoids an examination of dimpled or hanging chads.

Wiranto's legal team also accuse the KPU of turning a blind eye to a series of electoral violations, including vote-buying. And it is fair to say that neither of Wiranto's claims are without foundation if rumours are to be believed.

Mega's running mate, Hasyim Muzaadi - the non-active chair of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) the country's largest muslim organisation, was accused of having his campaign workers bribe influential muslim clerics in Central and East Java. Hasyim acknowledged he had given "donations" saying this was common practice when calling on a cleric, but insisted he had never attempted to buy their votes. For their part, the clerics denied ever receiving "donations".

Indonesian presidential election law states that candidates may be disqualified if they accept funds from sources whoese identity is unclear. Given this requirement, the corruption watchdogs TII and ICW saw fit to highlight that 15 of the individual and corporate contributers to SBY's campaign were all fictitious. Despite this obstacles, these non-existant entities managed to contribute 3.5 billion rupiah to the campaign. When the watchdogs looked at Mega's campaign records they detected 30 sources of finance that they considered dubious. One listed donor (a genuine PDI-P supporter) of 75 million rupiah was found living in a shabby dilapidated shack in Sulawesi. But a KPU commissioned audit into campaign sources put an end to the matter when it ruled that no further investigations into the matter were necessary. Putting pragmatism over principle a KPU member stated "we have learned that the candidates' campaign teams agreed to surrender funds from dubious sources to the state coffers, so no further legal measures should be taken. And so the show rolled on.

In many ways Wiranto's challenge was doomed to failure before it even reached the Constitutional Court. The number of votes involved was rightly seen as too conveniently coincidental. People could not understand how he could prove that the missing votes were intended for him alone. Wasn't it more likely that all candidates were effected roughtly equally by the KPU blunder? Could Wiranto show that his campaign manouvers were beyond reproach? But the most telling sign of his impending failure was the news that senior Golkar figures and other imbedded elites were already making overtures to Megawati. The rug was being pulled from under him.

In any event, Wiranto's legal challenge got off to a bad start and never looked back. The KPU's legal teams adopted early offensive tactics demanding of Wiranto's lawyers the proof that the KPU's poor performance in tabulating votes had denied Wiranto a place in the September 20 runoff. Wiranto's legal team's response was to stall. On the first day of hearings they asked the Court for more time to gather evidence and witnesses. On the second day, when KPU lawyers challenged them to produce evidence of vote violations during the count, they said that they had left such evidence at their offices and would produce it the next day. At this point the Court saw fit to point out that it would only review the claimif solid evidence was going to be produced. The writing was on the wall.

On Monday the following week (11/8), the Court dismissed Wiranto's claim. The ruling was expected, but significant. It was the first time in Indonesian history that a presidential election dispute had been settled by the courts rather than through a series of backroom deals or a show of force. Before the ruling even Wiranto, a consumate imbedded elite, gave it the legitimacy it needed when he said the ruling "will be a victory for all of us who have guarded democracy by moving conflict from the streets to the court." Wiranto's loss was therefore utterly without irony.