KPU Suspends 7 Election Officials over Voting Fiasco in Kuala Lumpur
Jakarta. The General Election Commission (KPU) has suspended seven officials responsible for overseeing polls for Indonesian citizens in Kuala Lumpur after a significant failure to deliver hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to voters.
This debacle has compelled the KPU to conduct a redo election in the Malaysian capital, potentially causing a delay in the overall vote-counting process from the Feb. 14 presidential and legislative elections.
"We have suspended seven members of the PPLN [Overseas Election Committee] in Kuala Lumpur due to issues in election management," KPU Chairman Hasyim Asy’ari said at his office in Jakarta on Monday.
The problems primarily arose from outdated data concerning over 490,000 eligible voters residing in the city. Consequently, the absentee ballots sent by mail failed to reach the majority of the voters.
Hasyim revealed that only around 62,000 voters have valid addresses in Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding areas. Many other addresses were invalid, often listed simply as "KL, Malaysia," he added.
Given this fundamental error, the KPU had no choice but to suspend officials and arrange a revote.
The KPU headquarters will now take charge of organizing a redo election in Malaysia, collaborating with the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Election Oversight Body (Bawaslu), according to Hasyim. He added that the revote will enable the KPU to update voters' data in Kuala Lumpur.
Hasyim also indicated that the revote will employ static polling stations and mobile ballot drop boxes, discontinuing the mail voting method commonly used in overseas voting.
Kuala Lumpur holds the largest percentage of the 1.75 million registered Indonesian voters staying in foreign countries and cities. Taipei follows at a distant second with 239,587 Indonesian voters, while Singapore ranks third with 95,297 voters.
Overall, there are more than 827,000 Indonesian voters residing in Malaysian cities and states, including Kuala Lumpur, Johor Baru, Penang, Kuching, Kota Kinabalu, and Tawau.
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Maria Gabrielle contributed to this story.
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