More than half of the ballots received by the Badung Regional Election Commission (KPUD) are defective, a meeting between election officials discovered Saturday. A coordination meeting between the Bali KPUD and KPUDs from the island’s eight regencies determined that many of the ballots sent from Jakarta by the General Elections Commission (KPU) to the Badung KPUD were damaged.

According to Agung Nakula, head of the Badung KPUD, the name of a legislative candidate was blurred and upside down and a check box that was supposed to be empty was already marked on more than 150,000 ballots received by the Badung KPUD.

Other papers had print lines over several areas of the papers, though they were not thick enough to fully cover the names of the legislative candidates. The marks affected candidates running for legislative candidates running for House of Representatives seats.

The Badung KPUD was supplied with more than 300,000 ballots. Nakula said his commission has put the ballots to the side instead of folding and distributing them to the voting areas. In response, Bali KPUD Chief I Ketut Sukawati Lanang Perbawa said he would coordinate with the Bali Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) and the KPU to find a solution to the problem.

Lanang said the defects could cause Indonesia’s notoriously loud legislative candidates to protest. Furthermore, he said, the election law specifically states that ballots with “unclear print-outs of num-bers or candidate names or bothersome tainting of the writings” are invalid. “Especially because we’re so close to voting day, we have to figure out whether we’re using these ballots or not,” Lanang said.

Saturday’s discovery compounds earlier reports of defective ballots from several KPUDs across the country. The KPUD’s in Bali’s seven other regions have yet to report any defects in their ballots outside of Bangli KPUD, which has began folding their ballots.

Reported by Andra Wisnu
Published on The Jakarta Post – www.thejakartapost.com