TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Migrant Care, an advocacy group for migrant workers, commented on the early distribution of thousands of voting papers in Taipei, Taiwan. The group’s director Wahyu Susilo stated that the incident showed that Indonesian elections abroad were still being conducted in an unprofessional manner.

“This situation and conditions also show that the organization and conduct of Indonesian elections abroad are still carried out haphazardly, carelessly, and unprofessionally,” Wahyu said in a written statement on Wednesday, Dec. 27. He said the General Election Commission (KPU) needed to take this matter more seriously.

The blunder, Wahyu assessed, created uncertainty among prospective Indonesian voters in Taipei and also other countries. Moreover, most of them were migrant workers.

Wahyu also said the KPU's statement on the case was only normative and procedural. The KPU described it as a form of disobedience and negligence on the part of the Taipei Overseas Election Committee (PPLN).

Therefore, he urged the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) to intervene and supervise the case. “Law enforcement must be carried out to restore the confidence of prospective Indonesian election voters overseas,” Wahyu said.

According to him, Migrant Care has long recommended evaluating the implementation of postal voting abroad because such a method cannot guarantee confidentiality, nor can the flow of distribution stages be supervised and monitored. “So this method has the potential to cause fraud,” Wahyu underlined.

As widely reported, the Taiwan PPLN gradually distributed ballot papers between Dec. 18-25, 2023, while the distribution was scheduled for January 2-11, 2024.

In response, the KPU head Hasyim Asy’ari said he had warned 128 PPLN to refrain from making similar mistakes. He said that the 31,276 voting papers in Taiwan were then classified as damaged and invalid.

SULTAN ABDURRAHMAN | IHSAN RELIUBUN

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