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House Calls KPU in Voters List Probe
Camelia Pasandaran | August 26, 2009

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The embattled General Elections Commission may have escaped attempts by the Elections Supervisory Board to take the body to task, but the House of Representatives is getting another crack at it.

The House announced on Tuesday that it would summon all government institutions implicated in the final voters list fiasco, including the elections commission, also known as the KPU, to testify before a special committee. The House Investigative Committee on Citizen’s Constitutional Rights Violations is to be reconvened today in a closed-door meeting to probe the problematic list.

United Development Party (PPP) legislator Lena Maryana, the deputy head of the investigation committee, said the KPU, the supervisory board, also known as Bawaslu, and the Directorate General of Population Administration at the Ministry of Home Affairs were expected to appear today.

“We’re planning to find out the cause of the voters list fiasco to revise the law,” she said. “Moreover, we will recommend legal punishment for those we find guilty in contributing to the voters list problem.”

She said the sanctions could be either administrative or criminal in nature.

Problems with the final voters list sparked a long-running saga that began before legislative elections on April 9, which was held despite complaints that hundreds of thousands — if not millions — were denied the opportunity to vote because their names had been omitted from the list. At the same time, deceased, underage or even multiple registered names were reported to be on the list.

The problems were widely acknowledged to have been resolved by the time of the presidential election on July 8, though losing candidates Jusuf Kalla and Megawati Sukarnoputri cited the same problems in a failed attempt to challenge the results of the presidential election in the Constitutional Court, which rejected the suits but slammed the KPU for incompetence.

While the KPU has taken most of the heat for the flawed list, observers have also fingered the largely unscathed Ministry of Home Affairs for providing shockingly inadequate voter estimates, known as the DP4 list, on which the temporary voters lists and final voters lists were based.

The House itself has not escaped criticism, with its late disbursement of budget funds earmarked for the KPU to prepare the elections also blamed for the delay in finalizing the final voters list.

Maryana said on Tuesday that, based on the investigation process that had commenced in June, the committee had found a number abnormalities regarding the list, including those committed by the ministry, which had “applied different systems to register citizens.”

Maryana said the hearings were expected to last until Sept. 12. The committee would then compose the report and forward its findings to the full House for deliberation.