The Electoral Supervisory Body (Badan Pengawas Pemilihan Umum, or

BAWASLU for short) and Election Commissions (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, or KPU
for short) are two electoral management bodies that share the same principle. In spite
of being in the same body, BAWASLU is often mistaken as KPU by common people.
Harwyn Malonda, the chairman of Suluts BAWASLU, stated, Practically, KPU and
BAWASLU were like living in the same house, but parted rooms. The differences
between them are mainly in the duties and functions of the bodies, but the main goal
is the same: to run the mandate of the law existed, which is to execute elections. As
for the duties of BAWASLU, they could be found in Article 74 of Law No. 22 of
2007, and the duties of KPU could be found in Article 10 of Law No. 3 of 1999.
Briefly, the duties of BAWASLU are as follows:
Supervising the preparation of the elections execution
Supervising the stages of the elections execution
Supervising the execution of court decisions
Managing and maintaining the documents
Supervising the execution of charge of criminal offenses in the election
Supervising the execution of the criminal offenses court decisions
Evaluating the supervision of elections
Arranging the result of the elections supervision
Executing other duties stated in the law
The duties of KPU are as follows:
Planning and preparing for the execution of general elections
Receiving, investigating, and deciding which political parties could
participate in the elections
Establishing Indonesias Election Committee which later is called PPI
(Panitia Pemilihan Indonesia) and coordinating the activities to run the
general elections from the central to the poll
Deciding the number of The House of Representatives and The
Regional House of Representatives 1 and 2 for each poll
Deciding the overall results of the elections in every poll for The
House of Representatives and The Regional House of Representatives
1 and 2
Collecting and systemizing the results of the elections
Leading the stages of elections
Besides the duties, BAWASLU also has several obligations as follows:
Being not discriminative in running their duties and authority
Performing supervision towards the execution of duties of BAWASLU
in every stage
Receiving and following up the report of the existence of criminal
offense in the elections
Reporting the result of the election supervision periodically as needed
Doing their other duties given by the law
There is not so much to compare from Electoral Supervisory Body of
Indonesia and other country. Most of long-standing-democracy country does
not really have electoral supervisor body established by the government, they

call it Election Monitoring, which is the observation of an election by one or

more independent parties, typically from another country or a nongovernmental organization (NGO), primarily to assess the conduct of an
election process on the basis of national legislation and international election
standards.
International organizations such as the Organization of American States,
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European
Union, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Council of Europe and the African
Union regularly deploy monitoring teams. The United Nations no longer
provides monitoring services, instead it focuses on electoral assistance.
Individual governments also participate in monitoring efforts, generally under
the umbrella of an international organization. These national efforts are
normally managed by the local electoral commission. A wide array of NGOs
also participate in monitoring efforts. The Carter Center, for example, played a
key role with the United Nations, Electoral Assistance Division and the
National Democratic Institute in building consensus on a common set of
international principles for election observation.
2014 is one of the years people have been waiting for. One of the
reasons is that after 10 years of dedicating himself to the country, Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono has finally finished his duty to run the mandate of
Indonesian people. A couple months ago we just had our presidential election,
which was one of the toughest ones since both candidates were equally
supported by the people of Indonesia. Thus, with a difference of an inch, the
presidential election was won by Joko Widodo.
Even though both candidates were supportive all along, there were several
problems during the election. Money politics was still a topic that could not be
avoided, it could in the form of a give-away money which was notorious of
being called serangan fajar. But the peak point of the problem was when the
neutrality of KPU was doubted since Lembaga Sandi Negara was rumored to
have put their hands on the execution of the presidential election. There was
even suspicions about the appearance of mysterious votes to manipulate the
votes.
KPU and BAWASLU have done a decent job at the recent presidential
election, but we still have a long way to go to reach fair, clean elections.