February 22, 2024
JAKARTA – The Tabulation Information System (Sirekap), the digital vote-counting and tabulating platform used by the General Elections Commission (KPU) for the 2024 general election, has drawn criticism for its apparent failure to reliably read vote tallies from scanned official forms.
When vote counting started a few hours after the polls closed on Feb. 14, local poll administrators (KPPS) and members of the public voiced complaints on social media about irregularities in vote count data on Sirekap, which is accessible through the KPU’s official website.
Among the complaints was that the vote counts shown on the platform were different from those on the manual C1 forms photographed or scanned by poll workers.
In some cases, the total votes shown on Sirekap exceeded the number of voters registered at the polling station. In others, the number of votes for certain candidates differed from the figure recorded on the manual form.
The Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) asked the KPU on Saturday to suspend the publication of the vote count on Sirekap until it could ensure the accuracy of the data on the platform.
Observers also raised concerns about the platform’s data security following claims that the data was stored in cloud services whose servers were located abroad, such as China, Singapore and France, tempo.co reported.
New platform
The KPU first used Sirekap in the 2020 regional elections to help with vote counting and tabulation. It replaced the Vote-Count Information System (Situng), a similar online vote tabulation platform last used in the 2019 general election.
Sirekap was made publicly available to provide transparency during the vote tabulation process, so that people could compare the manual tallies at polling stations with those recorded on the digital platform.
The official election results will still be based on manual tiered vote counting conducted from Feb. 15 to March 20.
The online application enables poll administrators to take pictures of the C1 forms at their polling stations and upload them to the platform, which then converts the figures into digital data using character recognition.
Poll workers are allowed to check whether the data on the form, including the total votes, was read correctly by the system. If not, they can make corrections directly on the platform, but only for the legislative contests.
A Tanah Abang district polling committee (PPK) official attends a vote counting meeting at the Tanah Abang city-owned sports hall in Jakarta on Feb. 19, 2024.
For the results of the presidential election, poll workers may only indicate whether the tallies appearing on the application are consistent with those on the form. If there are mismatches, corrections can only be made by the KPU at the municipality or regency levels.
This process is different from Situng’s, where the C1 forms were scanned only after they had been compiled by KPU officials at the city or regency level.
Members of the public can check the presidential election tallies recorded on Sirekap on the KPU’s website, pemilu2024.kpu.go.id. The site also shows the portion of the vote won by each political party in each electoral district for the legislative election.
Counting halted
In a press briefing on Feb. 15, the KPU acknowledged the data irregularities in Sirekap. KPU chairman Hasyim Asy’ari said the mismatches were a result of technical difficulties.
“The KPU doesn’t have the intention to manipulate [or] change the vote results because the C1 form was uploaded [to Sirekap] as it was,” Hasyim said.
On Monday, the KPU reported that presidential election data mismatches still existed for 1,223 polling stations, around 0.21 percent of the more than 585,000 polling stations across the country that had uploaded their C1 forms to the system.
The elections body had halted vote tabulation at the district level so that authorities could synchronize the tally on Sirekap with the manual forms, Hasyim said on Monday.
The KPU has also denied rumors that Sirekap data was kept on foreign servers.
“The storage of all [Sirekap] data is located in Indonesia,” KPU Commissioner Betty Epsilon Idroos said, adding that the commission prioritized data protection.
Observers have called for the poll body to perform an audit of Sirekap’s management. Vice presidential candidate Mahfud MD lent his voice to the calls on X, formerly Twitter, urging a digital forensic audit of Sirekap and the KPU’s servers by an independent agency rather than elections authorities themselves.