Chairman of General Election Commission, Arief Budiman, said up to now the Commission did more assessment and evaluation of the general election during the election stages only rather than the before and after stages. He has received input from students of UGM who encouraged the Commission to make external assessment and evaluation involving external groups for the three stages of elections.
“It has to be acknowledged that the General Election Commission has so far focused on the stages of election only,” said Arief Budiman, responding to research by UGM students at the seminar titled Roadmap Expose of Election Quality Assessment on Friday (9/6) at the seminar room of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences UGM.
In his opinion, what has been evaluated by the Commission in the central and regional levels was to know whether there was a conflict during campaigns or not, vote counting, participation figure, or recapitulation of voting. Besides, there were determinant factors related to evaluation of elections, namely the process of assessment and evaluation during the deliberation process of Election Law and regulations issued by the Commission. He viewed that there are people that can do evaluation of the quality of such regulation.
“Who will assess the process of regulation drafting because for the law drafting by Parliament and government, the Commission is only asked to give their opinion, but not listened to,” he said.
Ujang Sarif Durahman, graduate student of Politics and Government Studies, said according to the research they did on students, it is important for the Commission to do internal assessment so that the process of evaluation can be be done in stages. External evaluation should involve various elements, such as NGO, political parties, and academics. “Internal evaluation is done in stages so that the result is more binding from central down to regional levels,” he said.
Roadmad of election quality assessment can be made the reference and guidelines to achieve target and to improve the election quality from time to time.
Dean of the Faculty, Dr. Erwan Agus Purwanto, appreciated the Commission that had involved the students from various universities to modeling election quality assessment. He said the skills of the students was important to give input to the improvement of election quality by improving technical problems each time. “The problem of voters list, logistics and process of vote counting and tallies, we know all has to meet the judicial and political requirements so that they are acceptable to all, especially now we are coming to the legislative and presidential elections in 2019,” he said.