BY NURDIN HASAN
Banda Aceh, TAG – Polling officials in Aceh on Monday continued to press their case for the Constitutional Court to back their decision to postpone the elections in the northern-most Indonesian province, citing the amount of time it would take to verify new candidates.
Banda Aceh, TAG – Polling officials in Aceh on Monday continued to press their case for the Constitutional Court to back their decision to postpone the elections in the northern-most Indonesian province, citing the amount of time it would take to verify new candidates.
Yarwin Adi Dharma, a member of the Aceh Independent
Elections Commission (KIP), said that although the KIP had already announced it
would move the polls from Feb. 16 to April 9, it still needed the court’s
approval.
Early last week, the court ordered the reopening of the
registration window for candidates who missed out on the previous period. The
ruling also stipulated that the polls be held as scheduled next month, with no
delays to accommodate the one-week window for new registrations.
Yarwin pointed out that already there had been 22
new candidates registering their bids, with another two expected to sign up on Tuesday.
“We’ve been trying our best to verify them within
the seven days given to us under the ruling, but the truth is that we’re facing
great difficulty,” he said. “The biggest challenge is having to verify the
independent candidates.”
The KIP requires governor candidates running as independents
to present a petition with the signatures of 148,000 registered voters in order
to be eligible to compete. Those petitions are subject to confirmation during
the verification process, which Yarwin said would naturally be a time-consuming
process.
He added that besides the cross-checking, the KIP
still needed to administer health and Quran reading tests for all the new
candidates.
“How can we possibly do it in just seven days as
the court ruled?” he said.
Days after the ruling last week, the KIP announced
it had no choice but to postpone the elections, which will see voters across
the province choose a governor, 13 district heads and four mayors.
The KIP is now asking the court to legitimize the
latest delay because the new balloting date would come two months after the
term of Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf comes to an end that dated February 8.
This is the latest delay yet of the polls, which
had initially been scheduled to take place last November but got derailed when
the Aceh Party threatened a boycott in response to a Constitutional Court
ruling allowing independent candidates to run.
At the time, the KIP went on to register candidates
anyway, regardless of the boycott by the party, which dominates the provincial
legislature and derives its support from former members of the now-disbanded
militant Free Aceh Movement (GAM).[]
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Aceh Election Delay Awaiting Approval
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January 24, 2012
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