Hasil Pemilihan Umum Tahun 1982 di tingkat Provinsi dengan perbatasan provinsi yang disesuaikan dengan Tahun 2008
Kajian
Polling day: 1992 1992-06-09 I was keen to check out polling day. Those days I lived in the Brawijaya area of Kebayoran
Baru. So I wondered off early in the morning to see people quietly waiting to vote near the
Pangudi Luhur School.
Early that evening I decided to go to the Lembaga Pemilihan Umum – General Elections
Institute (now the Komisi Pemilihan Umum – General Elections Commission) to see if it was
possible to get some early results. I was a little surprised that the building was quite open and
unsecured (I still do not know why I should have been surprised. All government agencies in
Indonesia were – and remain – very open and accessible to visitors). Also the staff were quite
happy to talk and share information. Some were a little bemused as to why I would bother being
there, but seemed genuinely keen to be helpful. No matter how cynical one may have been about
elections then, it was nice to meet officials who demonstrated a spirited interest in electoral
processes.
This was my first engagement with the LPU. Who would ever have guessed that my life in the
future would be so closely linked to that agency! Interestingly I met some officials there would
remain active with the LPU (KPU) even up towards the 2004 elections.
In those days the results were distributed in the form of hourly photocopied versions of faxes
sent to the LPU from where the count was taking place – we were told it was military HQ. The
main visitors were some party people as well as journalists. I think I was probably the first ever
diplomat to bother visiting the place! The results were in the from of lists of provisional results
for each province for the national House of Representatives (DPR). These results were updated
hourly. So every hour we would go back and crowd about the office of the public affairs staff
and wait for the photocopies to be available.
Very early results (less than 5% of the vote counted) seemed to show an outrageous vote for
Golkar. Activists from PDI in particular were quite animated in frustration, even arguing that the
Government was stupid if it thought it could get away with such an obviously “manipulated” and
sham result.
Anyway as the night wore on and more results were posted, a somewhat more believable picture
began to emerge. PPP was not enjoying a bounce from its terrible result in 1987, while PDI was
indeed making some progress and building up from its already improved vote in 1987. Golkar's
vote began to fall from its 1987 high water mark.
Later in the evening I went to PDI HQ and sat about talking to some of the people there,
including (the late) Sophan Sophian. There was a bit of a buzz around the HQ at that point as
they began to sense that their overall vote would “be allowed to” rise. These notes were put together in June 2008: some 16 years after the events of the 1992 elections. The notes
represents my clearest recollections and impressions of the time. Polling day was Tuesday 9 June 1992.
