Bawaslu: Criminal Sanctions For Election Violators Don't Distract, Better Administrative Sanctions

DOK VOI

JAKARTA - Head of the Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) Abhan said that in practice, criminal sanctions for violations of general elections (Pemilu) and regional head elections (Pilkada) were not effective.

"In practice, this criminal sanction is not effective," said Abhan, Wednesday, September 22.

When referring to existing regulations, both Law (UU) Number 7 of 2017 concerning General Elections and Law Number 16 of 2016 concerning Regional Elections, there are 77 acts that are categorized as criminal acts.

There are also election crimes or elections that often occur, namely false support for individual candidate pairs. Furthermore, false documents or information regarding the terms of candidacy and the candidate, ASN or village head commits an act that benefits the candidate

There are also voting more than once, campaigns in places of worship or places of education. Other crimes include money politics or political dowries, misuse of government facilities and budgets for campaigning. Finally, changing the vote acquisition is not in accordance with the procedure.

The head of Bawaslu explained that the ineffectiveness of the criminal sanctions was due to a very long process. Therefore, said Abhan, in the future the approach to criminal sanctions should be changed to an administrative sanction approach.

According to him, administrative sanctions such as disqualification as participants are the most feared by candidate pairs (paslon).

"Because it is the administrative sanctions that create a deterrent effect for participants when there is a disqualification sanction, if the crime is not a deterrent," he explained.

Abhan added that there are many norms that regulate election crimes, namely 68 norms and are regulated in 43 articles. In the previous election, it turned out that only 25 percent of the dozens of articles that had been regulated in the law were applicable.

"The rest cannot be applied. This is why I think there needs to be a criminal sanctions approach to administrative sanctions," said Abhan.