Sirekap’s Evaluation and Recommendations for the 2024 Regional Elections

Technology and information are one of the instruments of transparency and accountability in elections, to organize effective and efficient elections. However, in its application, the Recapitulation Information System (Sirekap) in the 2024 Election still has several records in the recapitulation process and transparency issues. Even though its existence is very important to maintain public transparency and build election legitimacy.

“During these 4 years, we have seen proposals that have been adopted by the KPU in Sirekap. But it is still far from expectations, especially in the process of development and implementation,” said International IDEA’s Program Manager Regional Asia Pacific Adhy Aman in a discussion entitled ‘Sirekap in the 2024 Election: Evaluation and Recommendations for the 2024 Sentak Election’ in Menteng, Central Jakarta (6/7).

In fact, according to him, elections in Indonesia with a large number of voters require optimal technological assistance and innovation. Towards the implementation of the 2024 elections, he assessed that the KPU needs to be transparent about the intricacies of the Sirekap system, this is to mitigate the lack of public confidence in the electoral process.

“There should be obvious system trials and testing efforts, so don’t hide it,” he said.

Executive Director of the Network for Democracy and Electoral Integrity (Netgrit) and initiator of Jagasuara 2024, Hadar Nafis Gumay said Sirekap should be able to minimize errors and help speed up the recapitulation process. But instead, it creates a lot of confusion and suspicion that disturbs public trust in election organizers.

“Technology should be able to speed up this process, reduce costs, and ensure transparency so that we can see all data, including those that are wrong and those that have the potential for manipulation,” said Hadar.

He assessed that the use of Sirekap was still slow and had not helped speed up the recapitulation process, and even ended up being closed before the recapitulation time was over. Sirekap should be a tool for the tiered recapitulation process to ensure the suitability of manual recapitulation and can be used by the public to monitor and compare manual tiered recapitulation data with Sirekap.

“The closure of this system hinders transparency and public access to election data. This is one of the factors that makes sirekap fail to be implemented,” he said.

Hadar further noted that sirekap should ensure that the results of the system reading go through a verification process first, so that errors can be corrected before the data is published. He also proposed separate publication portals for the mass media and political parties to access complete data.

Sirekap should have a clear roadmap and go through a trial process long before the election so that the technology can be used properly by the Voting Organizing Group (KPPS) officers. However, Hadar believes that the testing of network resilience and security was not done properly, resulting in many problems that arose later on.

“So we conclude that sirekap is not fully ready to be used in elections,” he explained.

In the 2024 elections, a civil society coalition created the Jaga Suara movement to ensure the purity of election votes. Jaga Suara is a mutual cooperation movement to monitor the vote counting process in the 2024 Election by collecting photos and vote acquisition data from each polling station using the JagaSuara2024 application. Photos and reading results are then sent to the JagaSuara2024 server to be recapitulated and can be a comparison to the official results from the KPU. Jaga Suara found anomalous data in sirekap that sirekap did not read accurately.

JagaSuara2024 Technology Expert, Reza Lesmana, said that the actual use of technology for the 2024 Election is better than the 2019 Election. If in the 2019 elections the digitization mechanism was still manual, in the 2024 elections it already used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. In terms of operators, in 2019 the main operators were district / city KPUD officers, while in Sirekap the KPPS officers were direct.

“In Sirekap, the process of entering data at the beginning is very fast, even on the first day of vote counting, the data has been entered. But after three days, this process slowed down and the data entered was no longer displayed after March 5,” he explained.

According to Reza, the process was slow because many KPPS officers failed to upload the data, so it had to be taken over by officers at the village or sub-district level. In addition, the tightened data verification process also slowed down data transmission. KPPS officers were not allowed to correct the presidential election data, as a result many inappropriate data entered the system without correction.

In the 2020 Pilkada, there were still problems with data verification, out of 600 thousand downloaded data, more than 19 thousand polling stations were found with incorrect data, such as different votes or the wrong polling stations. Although the number of errors is not statistically significant, it still shows weaknesses in the system.

To face the 2024 elections, Jaga Suara recommends several things such as; more intensive KPPS training and giving KPPS permission to correct data, improving technology and strengthening the data verification process. In addition, according to Reza, Sirekap needs to create a complaint channel for data errors for the public, not through social media.

“All these processes must be more open and presented to the public to receive input and increase trust,” he said. []