After the recent viral story about a Chinese national owning an e-KTP (electronic ID card) stoked conspiracy theories that the government is mobilizing foreigners to vote for President Joko Widodo in April’s election, the outrage quickly died down after said foreigner was found to not be listed in the country’s voter database. However, more e-KTP holding foreigners have been identified for public scrutiny, only this time they were listed in the voter database.
This week, the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) in Ciamis Regency, West Java announced that they had found three foreigners — from the UK, China and Lebanon, respectively — who were registered to vote in the region. The finding once again sparked accusations of election fraud, but the General Elections Commission (KPU) said it was simply a case of human error on the part of their officials.
“There is no nationality column in the DP4 (temporary voters database), either for foreigners or Indonesians. The officials who finalized the database might have missed [the three foreigners],” KPU Ciamis chapter head Agus Fatah Hidayat told Kompas yesterday.
“[The three foreigners] have been wiped out [from the database]. It’s mandatory for foreigners who are in the DPT (permanent voters database) to be wiped out,” he added.
Agus went on to say that KPU doesn’t deserve all the blame in this case, as their finalized voters database was derived from the government’s e-KTP population registry.
Among the most common hoaxes about incumbent President Jokowi are those alleging that he is pandering to China and that the Chinese government is aiding his re-election effort. In January, the police arrested two people for spreading a hoax story about millions of tampered ballots from China supposedly aimed at helping Jokowi in April’s election.
More extreme hoaxes about Jokowi say that he is secretly a Chinese-Christian or that he’s secretly a member of the banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
