Bali Villagers Again Prove to Be Among Most Tech-Savvy Voters in the Country

Jakarta Globe, Ari Rikin, July 25, 2013

Teens parade in traditional Balinese costumes in Jembrana district,
Bali, on June 11, 2011. (JG Photo/JP Christo)

Bali’s Jembrana district is set to hold another electronic voting ballot when residents in four of Mendoyo Dangin Tukad village’s hamlets elect a new village chief on July 29.

The district is known as Indonesia’s e-voting pioneer for having adopted the state-of-the-art system in its dusun , or traditional hamlet, election back in 2009 and in several elections that followed.

This year, the e-voting system, developed by the government’s Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), will be verifying voters based on their electronic ID cards, or e-KTP.

Hammam Riza, the director of the BPPT’s Information Technology and Communications Center, said the village chief election in Jembrana would be a major breakthrough for Indonesia as it would be the first use of the e-KTP system in a ballot.

“This will be an effective and efficient solution for our country. The security of this system has also been prioritized. Electoral disputes have always stemmed from ballot fraud, which should be avoided,” he said in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Andari Grahitandaru, the head of the Electronic Election System Pro gram, echoed Hammam’s emphasis on the electronic system’s efficiency, citing the significant savings that could be made.

She cited a recent election for village chief in Boyolali, Central Java, where the government had to provide Rp 25 million ($2,430) for each of the 16 villages taking part in the election, for a total election budget of Rp 4 billion.

According to Andari, the e-voting system, which in 2010 was made official by a Constitutional Court ruling that allowed its application, would cut up to Rp 2 billion of the budget as regional administrations only needed to invest in five e-voting devices, each of them costing Rp 50 million, which could subsequently be reused in later years.

“Just imagine, all this time we could have repeated the village elections several times over,” she said.

“The price of democracy is quite expensive. There are 76,665 villages in Indonesia with [the total] election funds amounting to Rp 2 trillion.”

In 2010, Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi stated that the country would not be ready to fully apply the e-voting system in time for the 2014 legislative and presidential elections, but could have it in place for the 2019 polls.

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Kryon Q&A

Question: I recently attended a Kryon "At Home" seminar where Lee discussed that due to the grid changes, places like Sedona, Arizona, have less energetic resonance, while places like Mt. Shasta, California, now have an increased resonance. What other places now have an increasing resonance, and what can we do to help contribute to the new energy?

Answer (from Lee): There really isn’t anything you can do to enhance or contribute to what Kryon calls the new "vortals." This is an Earth process, and we just get to participate. Sedona is still a beautiful, energetic place, but it lacks the profound polarity of energies that used to be present there. It’s not because of anything that happened there, but rather the new energy of the planet, which is moving more toward Lemurian energies.

So Mt. Shasta is a big one, and Kryon has indicated that it’s ripe for a major change. Other areas that are being affected are New Zealand and Bali. These have very strong Lemurian energies.