Guardians of Indonesia’s votes

JAKARTA, Indonesia – For urban activist Elisa Sutanudjaja, it all started with a tumblr blog collating all sorts of problematic C1 forms – the vote tabulation sheets from each of Indonesia’s almost 500,000 polling centers – that went viral on social media.

“It was unorganized, and more often used to make fun of a certain presidential candidate even though they were unverified,” Elisa told Rappler. “I was thinking that there should be a more objective approach to this without shouting, ‘Cheaters!’”

She resorted to social media, primarily Twitter and Facebook, to find out whether there has been a coordinated effort to cross-check the scanned C1 forms uploaded onto the General Election Commission (KPU) website.

“I did not receive any answer until Friday [2 days after the July 9 presidential election], so I declared myself as coordinator [for volunteers],” she said.

Hundreds, thousands of volunteers

Soon Elisa would receive hundreds of emails from people volunteering to check the scanned C1 forms for anomalies, and hundreds more the following day.

“I created a Google form for them to fill in, and received help from an Indonesian mathematician living in Australia,” she said. Together, they would create a spreadsheet to compile the reports.

She also worked with Kawal Pemilu, a site created by Singapore-based Indonesian Ainun Najib which has already tallied almost all available C1 forms with the help of 700 volunteers.

On a similar “crowdsourcing” project called  Kawal Suara  (READ: ‘Crowd-counting’ Indonesia’s votes), users from about 7,000 unique IP addresses have voluntarily encoded and verified data on the C1 forms.

Kawal Suara founder Reza Lesmana credits these volunteers for spotting an unusual flood of wrong entries last Wednesday, which later emerged to have been a hacker attack. “[Volunteers] started rallying to counter the attack by verifying the false entries,” Reza said. “So most of the thousands of false entries got invalidated pretty soon.” (READ: 2 parallel vote count sites attacked)

Indonesians aren’t only volunteering to guard their vote online but out on the field as well.  

“There are hundreds here, volunteers from both camps, witnessing the vote tabulation process at Bogor district’s municipality office,” Mustar Bona Ventura, one of the volunteer coordinators in Bogor from the camp of Jakarta Governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo,  told Rappler on Wednesday, adding that the situation was peaceful.

Aside from all this, people can monitor tweets relating to safeguarding the recapitulation using the #kawalKPU hashtag. Other independent volunteer groups can also be found on facebook such as www.facebook.com/jagasuarapemilu2014.

Benchmark against fraud

The fact that this has been Indonesia’s most divisive presidential election contest, and that both candidates – Jokowi and former general Prabowo Subianto – claimed victory based on different quick counts, has led to concerns of fraud during the official vote counting process.  (READ: Poll fraud allegations circulate online)

“We compile vote counts from each of the polling stations, and we use this as a benchmark against fraud,” Mustar said.

Other initiatives like Mata Massa, an electoral fraud monitoring website developed by iLab and the Jakarta branch of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) to allow the public to submit reports, submits the ones it verifies to the Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu), which then asks the local Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) to follow up on them.

Elisa does the same. “We would periodically report irregularities to KPU unless there were something major. One time we found 50 duplicate forms from Bekasi district, this we reported immediately,” she said, adding that the commission was fairly swift in responding to her reports.

Bawaslu commissioner Nelson Simanjuntak, told Rappler they were grateful for the enthusiasm of grassroots volunteers.

“The highly competitive nature of this election motivated supporters from each camp to monitor the vote recapitulation process in order to ‘guard’ their own votes,” Nelson said.

It was so competitive, he continued, that both camps are so sensitized towards the smallest violation. “The intensity is very good in a way that it can prevent manipulation during the vote recapitulation process.”

Gerindra party’s head of Media Center Ariseno Ridhwan told Rappler he was wary of the “so-called quick counts and real counts that have obviously sided with the other camp,” referring to the 7 election day quick counts that found Jokowi to have won as well as to parallel counts of actual votes on Kawal Pemilu and Kawal Suara that also put Jokowi in the lead.  

Ariseno said they have their own team conducting vote verification and tallies on the field, but said that as of Friday, they were no longer announcing the result of their real counts as it is “against KPU’s calls.”

“Let’s just all wait for the official result, no need to prematurely announce anything,” he added.

But Mustar said that looking at the current actual count of votes, there would be little chance for KPU’s official result on July 22 to swing in Prabowo’s favor.

“From all the C1 data that we have, which is already 99%, Jokowi-JK is leading, how can [KPU] change that?” Mustar said. – Rappler.com