Jakarta. The General Election Commission (KPU) said on Monday that technical problems with the optical character recognition (OCR) in its vote counting machine led to misinterpretations of data, causing delays in the recapitulation of votes from the presidential and legislative elections held on February 14.

According to KPU Commissioner Betty Epsilon Idroos, the technical issue impacted 1,223 polling stations nationwide, representing 0.2 percent of the 586,646 polling stations that have transmitted their results from the presidential election to the KPU. The general elections involved more than 820,000 polling stations across all 38 provinces.

Election officials took photos of results from hand-counted ballot papers from every polling station and used an OCR-assisted app in their cellphones to read information depicted on the photos. The results were tabulated and published in the KPU’s vote counting web call “Sirekap”.

The problem arose when the OCR-assisted app used by election officials misread data from hand-counted ballot papers, causing discrepancies on Sirekap. 

When the app misreads the data, corrections cannot be made immediately.

“Polling station officials can report data discrepancy on the Sirekap website but they aren’t authorized to make corrections,” Betty said. “They flag any mistaken data that will be responded and corrected directly on the Sirekap web by the KPU office at the regency and municipal levels.”

In the legislative election, data discrepancies affected 4,167 polling stations. The KPU clarified that the Sirekap website is designed to disseminate information to the public and is not the official tool for counting votes. The official vote tally is tabulated and certified in a hierarchical system from the districts, regencies, cities, and provinces up to the national level.

Votes cast in foreign countries were certified by authorized representatives before being delivered for national certification. Ultimately, the data published on the Sirekap website will be adjusted to match the certified results.