Amalia Nurma Dewi & Bent Sorensen
Presented at 7th International Graduate Students and Scholars' Conference in Indonesia
4 November 2015

The Violation by KPU of the Public Information Disclosure Act concerning the Blind Citizens in the Presidential Election2014

Amalia Nurma Dewi and Bent Sørensen

Abstract

We need to know our responsibilities and rights, so that we can play our role in society and live meaningful lives. To fully understand our responsibilities and our rights we need information. Information is essential for each component of citizenship or through information, governance distributes power and rights to citizen in order to conduct good governance. It has consequences in transparency - citizen must have knowledge about the governance, it is not just the governance which must have knowledge about the citizen. Furthermore, good governance involves distribution of information for every citizen, not just single collective groups. No groups should be neglected. In Indonesia the General Elections Commission has the responsibility to hold general elections, and it has signed an agreement with The Indonesian Parliamentary Center. The agreement says that KPU will be committed to apply The Public Information Disclosure Act to their services, but on the presidential elections of 2014 six organizations representing the blind community held a conference in Gedung Menggugat Indonesia to focus on the lack of clarity of information and socialization of the blind citizens in relation to the presidential elections. On the conference KPU was accused of discriminating the blind citizen, not giving them sufficient information, and thereby, violating their political rights. In the following we will analyze some weaknesses within The Public Information Disclosure Act itself and the implementation of the act by the KPU, and then, secondly, we will analyze the implementation of the act in relation to the concept of good governance.

Keywords: Information, information policy, The Public Disclosure Act, good governance, and the blind community

            A citizen is a member of a political community, which is defined by a set of rights and obligations. Citizenship therefore represents a relationship between the individual and the state, in which the two are bound together by reciprocal rights and obligations (Heywood, 1994). As a citizen, we need to know our responsibilities and rights, so that we can play our role in society and live a meaningful life. To fully understand our responsibilities and our rights we need information. Information is essential for each component of citizenship: civil, political, social and economic, or we can say that through information, governance distributes power and rights to citizens in order to conduct good governance.^[1] It has consequences in transparency - citizens must have knowledge about the governance, it is not just the governance which must have knowledge about the citizens. Furthermore, good governance involves distribution of information for every citizen, not just single collective groups. Or put the other way around: no groups should be neglected or kept out. An important part of good governance involves the regulation of information between citizens and governance stated in information policies.

An information policy is comprised of laws, regulations, and doctrinal positions - and decision making and practices with society-wide constitutive effects - also involving information creation, processing, flows, access, and use (Breman, 2011). Hence, the scope is comprehensive. Whether the subject under discussion is access to government information, mass media, the census, research funding, or network neutrality, this approach makes it possible to analyze the issue at hand through a common lens. Indeed, it provides a means of identifying information policy issues that may not have been historically evident despite their constitutive impact, such as export controls, the census, and rules for accounting systems (Breman, 2007).

The Public Information Disclosure Act is a part of the Indonesian information policy regulating the creation, processing, flow, access and use of information from the Public Agency to the citizen in order to empower the last mentioned. The act warrants the public agencies must provide information to the citizens of Indonesia. A Public Agency is an executive, legislative, judicative agency or its functions and main duties are related to the organizing of the state (Public Information Disclosure Act, article 1 (3), 2008).

In 2014 the presidential elections were held in Indonesia.  The General Elections Commission (KPU) was in charge of organizing the process of election also informing the citizen of the very process itself - most notably the act of voting. The Public Information Disclosure Act (number 14, 2008) was the overall frame work within which the KPU should inform to the public about the elections).  The KPU had committed them selves to implement The Public Information Disclosure Act starting from the presidential elections in 2014. The Act was - and still is - seen as an instrument in order to conduct good governance. However, the implementation of the Act was met with opposition from the blind community because they were not correctly nor sufficiently informed about the process of voting as a blind citizen.      

KPU (The General Elections Commission) is a public agency, who has the responsibility to hold general elections in Indonesia (http://www.kpu.go.id/index.php) , and has signed an agreement with The Indonesian Parliamentary Center (a non governmental organization who has the function to support the legislative department and also to control the governance performance). The agreement says that KPU will be committed to apply The Public  Information Disclosure Act to their services, however, on the presidential election of 2014 in Bandung, six organizations for blind community -  Ikatan Alumni Wyata Guna (IAWG), DPC Persatuan Tuna Netra Indonesia (Pertuni), DPD Pertuni, DPP Ikatan Tuna Netra Muslim Indonesia (ITMI), DPW ITMI, and PW Persatuan Olahraga Tuna Netra Indonesia (PORTI)  - held a conference in Gedung Indonesia Menggugat to focus on the lack of clarity of information and socialization of the blind citizens in relation to the presidential election (www.Sindonews.com 2014). On the conference KPU was accused of discriminating the blind citizens, giving them incomplete or insufficient information, and thereby, violating their political rights. But the question is, of course, firstly, how did this happen and, secondly, why? Before we will take a look that, we will first, however, briefly mention our theoretical framework and method of analysis.

Theoretical framework and method of analysis

Information is essential for each component of citizenship or we can say that through information, governance distributes power and rights to the citizens - within the civil, political, social and economic areas (cf. Breman 2007) - in order to conduct good governance. Governance concerns decision making and the implementation of these decisions in relation to the citizens. In order to analyze good governance we need to focus on the actors involved in the decision making and the implementation of the decisions whereby we can relate these to the essential characteristics of good governance: Transparency, participation, equity and inclusiveness, as well as accountability (cf. Sheng 2008). Hence, within the framework of information as power and the concept of good governance we will try to make a critical literature analysis of The Public Information Disclosure Act itself and the implementation of the act done by the KPU. However, let us begin by taking a closer look at the context of the presidential election of 2014 concerning the communication or the information given to the blind community by KPU and the reaction of the blind community seen from their conference held in Gedung Menggugat Indonesia (Perdana, 2015)

The events before and during the presidential election of 2014

            Some months before the presidential election of 2014, KPU did publish some information on their website, saying that they will simulate the use of blind templates - so that blind citizens can become independent voters (KPU.go.id). With the blind templates blind citizens can “read” information about the presidential candidates (who is the president candidate number one and who is the president candidate number two etc.) as well as the procedure for the blind citizens when they are giving their vote. However, two weeks before the presidential election, blind citizens in some areas of Indonesia did not receive relevant or sufficient information about the election from KPU. KPU gave information about the election on a website (Muhyiddin, 2015), and the majority of the blind citizens in Indonesia do not have access to the internet^[2]. Hence, no socialization did take place as was said or was promised on the KPU website before the presidential election. Because of this, one week before the election more than two million blind citizens assigned a petition saying that they do not want to use their vote on the presidential election. However, KPU did not give thorough attention to the petition and they did not formulate an official response (http://pemilu.sindonews.com).

            During the presidential election, the blind citizens could not read the information on their voting letter concerning who is the presidential candidate number 1 and who is the presidential candidate number 2, because the voting letter was not formulated in a braile template. However, some of the blind citizens still decided to give their vote, and thereby they had to ask someone to help them giving the vote on the voting letter. The problem was, of course, that the blind citizens could not be sure whether the person helping them was actually voting on the presidential candidate of their choice. Furthermore, some of the people helping the visually impaired with voting did not fill in the C3-form because the KPU did not present sufficient information about the form. C3 is a form that should be filled in by people helping the visually impaired concerning their personal information (like name, address, relation to the blind person etc.), and a statement that they will not misuse^[3] the vote of the blind person (Muhyiddin, 2015).

The other violation of KPU concerns that it did not give all their officers information about the right procedure when helping blind citizens in voting in the presidential election. In some TPUs (tempat pemungutan suara) blind citizens were treated unprofessionally by the officials (http://indonesia-baru.liputan6.com/, 2015). This caused numerous of the blind citizens not to give their vote – approximately more than 2.000.000 people. Hence, they choose not to participate in the presidential election because they felt that they have been treated as second ranked citizens.

            Because KPU did not live up to the Public Information Disclosure Act concerning their services and lacked responding to the petition of the blind citizens, it means that KPU did not meet the rights of the blind citizens to receive information concerning the elections, also bringing the political rights of the blind citizens in real danger.

Why did this problem occur?

            The problem occurred because of two main reasons: the weakness of The Public Information Disclosure Act it self and the inconsistency and lack of good implementation of The Public Disclosure Act by The KPU.

·    The weakness of The Public Information Disclosure Act it self

The Public Information Disclosure Act was indorsed in 2008 by Mahakamah Agung, but The Public Agency did not apply the act before the year 2010. Some weaknesses, however, can be found in the act and reading  article 6  3(e) it says, that The Public Agency can refuse an information request by citizens, if the request concerns information that is not within their own resort and authority or that request concerns information that was not documented yet, even if we can also read in article 13 that every public agency has an obligation to appoint an information management and public documentation officer, which should function to document the activities of The Public Agency and publish information to the public. However, there is no article which exactly states when the public agency must have an information management and public documentation officer. Furthermore, there is no article regulating when The Public Agency should full fill the information request (on article 10 (7); the Public Agency has a maximum of 10 days to inform, whether they will accept/ refuse the request; not stating exactly when they should full fill the request). Furthermore, there is no “serious sanction” for The Public Agency if it does not provide the requested public information – the article 52 states that The Public Agency has to pay five millions Rupiahs for not full filling the request of the information).

When the blind community accused KPU with discrimination - e.g. KPU did not give the blind citizens access to relevant and timely information - at first the KPU answered the critique with saying that the blind citizens must await further information because KPU themselves did not yet have any clear information about how to conduct the presidential election for the blind citizens (KPU (article 6, 3 (e). However, some months later KPU announced that it was not within their budget to inform the blind citizens and that they could not provide them with a special template for voting (http://indonesia-baru.liputan6.com).

The above mentioned weaknesses of the Public Information Disclosure Act make room for The Public Agency to work unprofessionally when trying to implement and apply the act, and can even be seen as “a way of protecting” The Public Agency themselves when they are working with the Act. In short: the weaknesses seem to be based on a bias from the side of public system giving The Public Agency more power, and not enough power to the blind citizen.

Looking at the articles 6 3(e) and 9 (3) we can see why these articles seem to inhibit a professional implementation of the act. Based on article 6 3(e), KPU did not do anything wrong because they did not have the information that was asked for by the blind citizen. And, furthermore, based on article 9 (3) “the obligation to provide and to submit public information is conducted at least every 6 months”, we can see that even two weeks before the presidential election and when, in fact, the presidential election did take place, and blind citizen still had not received the information that they needed from KPU, this was not, however, a violation according to article. But, still, we can say that even though KPU did not violate those articles, they did, in fact, violate the essence of the act itself concerning the guarantee of The Public Agency to provide information to the blind citizen.

Concerning article 3 the purpose of this article is to make good governance possible including participation, transparency, and accountability. In fact, this is the essence of The Information Public Disclosure Act. However, and unfortunately, some articles within this act do not support the purpose, because they stand on the side of the public agency^[4], allowing unprofessional work. Those articles make the act powerless, not endowing The Public Agency with force. Surely, a Public Information Disclosure Act should have its articles very well balanced between the interests of The Public Agency (the governmental side) and the interests of the citizens; e.g. it is important that – seen from the side of The Public Agency – the sole interests of the citizen will not take over; however, balance is here the keyword, so that the main purpose of the act will not loose its essence.

·    The inconsistent implementation of The Public Information Disclosure Act by KPU

Before the presidential election in 2014, KPU had declared to commit them selves to implementing The Public Information Disclosure Act. Hence, KPU signed an agreement with The Indonesian Parliamentary Center thereby marking a new awareness of increasing the quality of public access to their services also guaranteeing the information rights of the citizen.  However, KPU did not live up to this commitment as described in the problem focus above. There lies a complex cause behind this problem.

The idea of committing KPU to The Public Information Disclosure Act just took place on the managerial level. Hence, the act was never fully anchored on the staff level (Anwar, 2015)  on the staff level the idea was not clearly understood and, therefore, the implementation of the act could not go well.

Before the time of the presidential election in 2014 KPU did give information to the blind citizen when they published information on their website about launching a blind template, also emphasizing simulation, and the socialization of the blind citizen. However, at the time of the presidential election this did not take place (http://pemilu.sindonews.com).  

This shows, among other things, that the commitment to implement The Public Information disclosure Act on the staff level was limited to publishing information about certain activities on a website; there was no simulation, nor socialization, due to, it was said, a limited budget, not allowing to give information to the blind citizen. 

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