Advanced! Brothers And Sisters In South Sumatra Design Invitations To Vote For Village Head Elections With Barcode System

Ballots using a barcode system during the village head election in Sungai Lumpur Village in OKI, South Sumatra (ANTARA/HO)

SOUTH SULAWESI - Two brothers and sisters innovated the use of a barcode system on ballots to prevent fraud in the Village Head Election in their village, Sungai Lumpur Village, Cengal District, Ogan Komering Ilir (OKI) Regency, South Sumatra.

Givo Braders and Kasogi Braders assisted in the implementation of the Village Head Election in their village, by creating an IT system that the committee could use easily.

"We built this system in approximately one month", said Givo, who was contacted from Palembang, as quoted by Antara, Wednesday, October 13.

Ogan Komering Ilir Regency held Simultaneous Village Head Election in 156 villages on Tuesday, including Sungai Lumpur Village.

Givo told that he and Kasogi were asked to help the government in his village to make innovations in the Village Head Election because there had been chaos the previous year.

He explained that the database that was created consisted of data on NIK, age, election number, and photos of voters. We collect the data one by one and then process it into the data center.

The output is a barcoded invitation letter. When scanned, the data will appear on the screen.

The difficulty faced by both of them was when collecting data because they had to go to 1,761 voters one by one to be photographed.

This is for the need to create a barcode in the invitation letter so that photos of prospective voters will automatically appear. So the committee had no trouble identifying the voters. The invitation letter also cannot be faked or brought by someone else.

In addition, another advantage of this system is that when counting votes, the committee can count votes faster because they only need to enter data into each ballot card in the system.

"This method will minimize fraud, which is clear, we are happy to be able to take part in this Village Head Election", said Givo.

The chairman of the Sungai Lumpur Village Head Election Committee, Anwar, said that this system had been used in the Village Head Election and it was proven that there were no double voters.

He said that his party asked for help from the two brothers because the village election in their village was problematic, due to the existence of multiple voting points, forged invitation letters, and stealth voters (jockeys).

This can happen because Sungai Lumpur Village is a village located in a coastal area with the population scattered in several locations so that the Village Head Election committee finds it difficult to identify each candidate voter.

To that end, the village committee agreed to create a voter database and a screening system for village head election invitations.

“We empower rural youth who study in the city. We ask them to go home first to help carry out this year's Village Head Election", said Anwar.

The head of the OIC Trade Office who is in charge of monitoring the implementation of the village head elections in local villages said this system could be a model for the implementation of village elections throughout Indonesia, especially in areas prone to manipulation of voter data.

In fact, the KPU needs to study what has been made and implemented in the Sungai Lumpur Village Head Election, to minimize fraud and also minimize working time, he said.