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Opposition is mounting to a decision by the General Elections Commission to allow certain unregistered voters to use their identity cards to vote in the July 8 presidential election, including claims on Sunday by election and legal experts and a sitting lawmaker that the plan violates the Presidential Election Law.

Under fire for allegedly producing a wildly inaccurate voters list and denying people the right to vote in April’s legislative elections, the KPU late last week said it planned to allow voters named on the temporary voters list, but not on the final list, to vote using ID cards.

Abdul Hafiz Anshary, chairman of the commission, also known as the KPU, had said there were reports of many voters being left off the final voters list for the April 9 polls.

However, Lena Maryana, a House of Representatives member from the United Development Party (PPP), said allowing unregistered voters to cast ballots was against the law.

“The Presidential Election Law states that voters should be registered to vote,” Lena said, adding that the KPU plan could lead to fraudulent voting. “Many of our citizens have more than one identity card. Applying the KPU plan will open the possibility of double voting.”

Refly Harun, a former legal adviser to the Constitutional Court, said that although he sympathized with the KPU’s intentions to help disenfranchised voters, the Election Law prohibited voting by people whose names appeared on the temporary voters list but not on the final voters list.

“The law states clearly that voters should be registered on the final voters list to be allowed to vote,” said Refly, now a senior researcher with the Center for Electoral Reform (Cetro).

Refly, together with another voter, had filed for a judicial review of the Presidential Election Law with the Constitutional Court, seeking a ruling that would allow people like them — whose names have been left off the voters list — to vote using their identity cards.

The KPU has also said that the final voters list might be further revised before election day if local election supervisory committees recommend it. The KPU, Hafiz said, was ready to accommodate such recommendations by printing up to 10 percent more ballot papers.
“It’s probably a good initiative by the KPU,” Refly said, “but it’s not enough, it’s a half-hearted plan. Should the KPU want to solve the problem completely, it should allow all [otherwise] eligible voters to vote without the condition of being registered on the temporary voters list.”

Engelbert Johannes Rohi, deputy secretary general of the Independent Committee for Election Monitoring (KIPP), said the KPU plan not only violated the law but could create major logistical problems.

“The number of ballot papers already provided has been adjusted to reflect the number of voters plus 2 percent,” he said. “If the number of additional voters that come to the polling stations is more than 2 percent, there may be another serious problem.”

He said there were five million more voters on the final voters list for next month’s election than the number of voters who had previously registered for the April 9 elections, and it would be difficult to predict how many more ballots would need to be printed. “We don’t know the exact number of unregistered voters,” Rohi said. “What if it goes beyond the KPU’s estimate?”