Visiting KPU To Discuss Sirekap Transparency, ICW: In The Midst Of Allegations Of Election Cheating

Chairman of the KPU Hasyim Asy'ari. (ANTARA PHOTO-Hafidz Mubarak A)

JAKARTA - Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) researcher Egi Primayogha asked for the transparency of the General Elections Commission (KPU) regarding the Recapitulation Information System (Sirekap).

The transparency is related to procurement documents, budget documents, and also the list of damages that have occurred in Sirekap. Therefore, ICW came and wrote to the KPU asking for data.

"We did that so that we could check how the process was, was it in accordance with good and clean governance?" said Egi at the KPU Office, Jakarta, Thursday, February 22, which was confiscated by Antara.

ICW also encourages the KPU to audit Sirekap as a tool for calculating votes for the 2024 General Election. He explained that Sirekap audits needed to be carried out to find out the basic reasons for the KPU to implement Sirekap in the 2024 election which was so complex.

"In the midst of the massive election fraud, of course we want to check whether there is really fraud that happened through Sirekap. So, we want to check the documents first to make sure that fraud will not happen," he said.

According to Egi, this step is the participation of civil society in the information held by the Public Agency as stipulated in Law Number 14 of 2008 concerning Public Information Disclosure (KIP).

Based on Article 12 of KPU Regulation Number 1 of 2019, the KPU as a public body is required to give a response no later than three working days.

Previously, KPU member Betty Epsilon Idroos said that his party would evaluate the infrastructure to human resources (HR) of polling group officials (KPPS) regarding data errors between Form C results uploaded to Sirekap with data at polling stations (TPS).

"The system will depend on humans very much, whatever type of information system is used it will also depend on its users. Therefore, this is part of the KPU's evaluation," said Betty at the KPU Building, Jakarta, Monday, February 19.

Betty said uploading data by KPPS officers at each TPS requires adequate infrastructure, such as mobile phones or cellphones to fast internet networks.

The reason is, according to Betty, the Form C data for these results must be photographed using the devices of each KPPS member. Then, the photo is inserted into the Sirekap site.

Sirekap is known to use optical sign recognition (OMR) technology and optical character recognition (OCR) recognition.

The technology allows to recognize manual writing patterns and can be translated as a number value. Thus, numbers in the form of writing can be directly converted into numerical data in Sirekap.

Betty explained that the problem occurred when Sirekap's technology could not detect photos of number writing properly, resulting in differences in numerical data.

Then, KPU member Idham Kholid said the vote count was delayed because his party had synchronized the TPS data with data in Sirekap.

However, he ensured that the recapitulation process carried out by officers had been carried out in several major cities, including Jakarta.