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underdeveloped areas with no internet connection, are not ready for digital elections, said commission chairman and Golkar Party lawmaker Zainuddin Amali.
General Elections Commission (KPU) chairman Arief Budiman previously said that the lack of infrastructure in some areas would hinder the application of e-voting.
“If data from one polling station could not be included in the national vote tally, the KPU could not determine the election results,” he said as quoted by online news portal detik.com. He added that e-voting machines would also be costly. One polling station, he said, might need at least five e-voting machines, including two back-ups, while some 800,000 polling stations were involved in the last elections.
An e-voting machine costs around US$3,000. The KPU has proposed that Indonesia use digital technology to count, not cast, the ballots. “The counting process is where most problems occur. The officers become exhausted from counting, not serving the voters at polling stations,” said KPU commissioner Viryan Azis. The engineer tasked with developing an e-voting system at the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) disagreed with the House and the KPU, saying that technology-wise and culture-wise, Indonesian voters are ready to vote digitally, but the political elites are still reluctant to depart from the manual system.
“It actually depends on the readiness of our elites,” Andrari Grahitandaru, the head of the e-voting program at BPPT, told The Jakarta Post recently.
Digital elections using e-voting machines developed by the BPPT had been successfully implemented in 981 village head elections in 18 regencies across the country, she said, adding that some of the villages were considered “remote” or even “backward”.
Among the remotest regions are Musi Rawas in South Sumatra and Bantaeng in South Sulawesi. In areas with no electricity, the BPPT used car batteries as a power source for the e-voting machines, according to Michael Andreas Purwo, head of the agency’s information technology and communication center. According to the BPPT, the state might need to spend up to Rp 50 million ($3,500) per polling station in a digital election. It is still cheaper, Michael argued, as the machines could later be rented and used multiple times. “The BPPT can always update and develop the technology,” he said.
That said, Andrari argued that whether or not Indonesia was ready to implement e- voting in 2024 depended on the political will of the government and the House to reform the nation’s election system, not the voters. A departure from a manual to a digital system would change the business side of elections and political leaders must be willing to change it, she said.