Getting To Know The Noken System, The General Election System Implemented In Papua

Illustration of the 2024 (Between) election

YOGYAKARTA Did you know that Papua Province implemented a noken system in general elections. This system is followed by the Papuan people, especially those in mountainous areas. Then, what is a noken system in the Papuan elections?

Quoted from the Malang City Bawaslu website, the noken system is a system applied to special elections in Papua Province. This system is related to traditional leaders in Papua. This happened because the traditional Papuan people entrusted all decisions to the elders or tribal chiefs.

The noken system can be understood as a connective system, namely elections with the principle of collectivity and only implemented in Papua Province, which still uses this system. This means that not all areas of Papua adopt a noken system in the election.

The implementation of the noken system itself is divided into two ways, big man noken and hanging noken. The bigman noken is that all the voices of the people are represented by the traditional chairman. Meanwhile, in the hanging noken, residents can see agreements and voting. The noken system represents the highest deliberation to determine opinions without secrets in the tribe.

In its implementation, the election for the noken system itself was first held in Papua Province in 2004 in 16 districts. The reason the noken system was held in Papua is as follows.

As is known, election organizers must distribute logistics to various regions including in the interior of Papua which is very difficult to access. Moreover, Papua is a mountainous area that has a steep area and a deep ravine.

It must be admitted that the province of Papua has a society that is still traditional. They are still living communally and do not know the general election system very well. Therefore, to help them make decisions, handing it over to the tribal chief is the right thing for now.

This reason is one of the references for patents for the existence of noken elections in Papua. For example, the people of Papua in the interior do implement a traditional political system called bigman (bigman). In this system, decisions related to communities or kelompk will be discussed collectively collegially. For example, the community will gather and discuss matters relating to social interests of the community and then the results will be an absolute decision and announced by the tribal chief (big man).

In addition to knowing the noken system in Papua, visit VOI.ID to get other interesting information.