There Is No Manual Vote Recapitulation In The 2020 Pilkada

Capture the discussion screen with the theme of Elections during the Pandemic, at Graha BNPB, East Jakarta which is broadcast on YouTube

JAKARTA - Chairman of the General Election Commission (KPU) Arief Budiman said the process of recapitulation of the 2020 regional head election (Pilkada) results was no longer carried out manually or tiered from sub-districts, regencies or cities, to provinces.

"There is no recapitulation for days in sub-districts and then city regencies," said Arief in a discussion at Graha BNPB, East Jakarta, Monday, June 6.

The reason, said Arief, was that all stages of the elections, from registration, to the campaign period, to the election day which was to be held on December 9, had to apply the COVID-19 protocol.

Meanwhile, the implementation of manual recapitulation is carried out by gathering election administrators, both the KPU and the Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu), the government, and witnesses of each candidate. It is feared that this will become a place of transmission for COVID-19.

Therefore, in order to formally count and validate the results of the regional head candidates, the KPU will carry out an electronic recapitulation (e-Rekap).

"So, once the votes at the polling stations have been counted, they will be captured (photographed), sent to our data center, then immediately recapitulated electronically," said Arief.

"Usually, the KPPS (polling organization) makes hundreds of copies to give to witnesses, it doesn't need to exist anymore. Political parties participating in the election also don't need to send witnesses because the captured data will also be sent," he continued.

Actually, e-Recap has been carried out since the 2014 Election to the 2019 Election. However, calculations and official approval are still carried out by manual recapitulation with in-person meetings.

This is because e-Recap is only limited to supporting transparency in the implementation of elections, which can be seen by the public on the Calculation Information System (Situng) on the KPU's official website.

Now, when the COVID-19 pandemic entered Indonesia, changes in the pattern of community activities that were mostly carried out online made Arief think that e-Rekap could be used as official validation of voting results.

"Our cultural readiness states that the official e-Recap is what we want to encourage. We are designing the e-Recap with a team from ITB. It will also be sent to election participants. So, the recapitulation will be very simple if this design is approved," concluded Arief.