REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA -- The Home Affairs Ministry is deploying a special team to resolve problems in the eligible voters' list (DPT).
"We are deploying a 50-member special team to various regions to help the General Election Commission (KPU) update data on 'problem' voters on the DPT," Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi said here on Friday.
The minister said the result of the team's work in the region would be submitted to the KPU.
The KPU recently announced the eligible voters' list, or the DPT, which consists of 186.6 million people who have the right to vote in next year's legislative and presidential elections.
However, about 10.4 million of the 186.6 million voters on the list are causing problems because they are not included in the List of Potential Voters (DP4).
The DP4 is provided by the Home Affairs Ministry and forms the basis on which the KPU decides the number of eligible voters in the next elections.
The 'problem' voters have not been registered on the DP4 because their citizenship identity numbers (NIK) are not known. According to law, a voter should have an NIK before he or she is considered eligible to cast a vote in the elections.
The KPU and the Ministry of Home Affairs are cooperating to trace the NIKs of these voters.
Minister Gamawan said, until Friday, his ministry had found the NIKs of 3.1 million voters, enabling their names to be added to the DP4.
"I have received a report from the Director General for Population and Administration Affairs that the NIKs of the 10.4 million have been found. That data was found through field work, and matches the population administration data," the minister added.
The KPU said earlier it had made corrections in the data of about 3.2 million 'problem' voters. Their data was found in a number of regions, such as North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Gorontalo, West Java and Papua.
KPU commissioner Nafis Gumay said the data of the voters caused problems because when the officials were collecting data earlier, some voters did not remember their NIKs. The officials did not take notes of these voters, he added.
"However, the number of 10.4 million 'problem' voters has now been reduced to seven million. We are convinced that we will complete the NIK identification of the remaining voters. It is, however, possible that we might not find data on those people who never obtained an NIK," KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay said.
"Prisoners, for example, did not give their NIKs when our officials went collect data because they only met prison heads. A similar issue arose with students in boarding schools and rented rooms. Their NIKs are mentioned on their family cards, which are kept in their villages," Gumay added.
Last week, the General Election Commission was given 30 days to make corrections to the eligible voters list (DPT).
"We have been given one month's time to make the corrections. The Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) will evaluate it later. We will verify the data and complete the information on the voters' Population Registration Numbers (NIK) from the field, along with the Director General for Population and Administration Affairs," Husni Kamil Manik said.
The KPU announced the completion of the eligible voters list during an open plenary session last week, with the number of voters estimated at 186.6 million throughout the country, including 93.44 million male voters and 93.17 million female voters. These figures exclude the 2.01 million voters eligible to cast their ballots from overseas.
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