Diagnosing the Three Main Diseases of the Five-Box System

To understand the rationality of the Constitutional Court's decision, we first need to sit quietly and clearly diagnose what diseases our election system has actually contracted. Based on the facts of the trial, there are at least three chronic diseases that have been identified.

First, the death of voter rationality in the polling booth. We often talk about "smart voters", but we seem to deliberately design a system that actually kills that intelligence. Let's make a simple analogy. Imagine you go into a grocery store and are asked to choose one type of bath soap. You may be able to choose rationally based on needs and knowledge. Now imagine you go into the same store, but in front of you there are 540 types of bath soap, and you are only given two minutes to choose. Is that a choice? Of course not. It is a compulsion to choose randomly, or even not to choose at all.

That is what our voters face. In front of them are five ballot papers, with hundreds of candidate names that cannot possibly be recognized one by one. The result? As the data in the application shows, millions of people's votes are burned into invalid votes. In the 2019 Election, there were 17.5 million invalid votes for the DPR RI, and in 2024 there were 15.5 million. These lost votes, if converted, are equivalent to the acquisition of seats by a major political party in parliament. This is not just a statistical figure, this is the constitutional voice of the people that is lost due to a flawed system design.

Second, the paralysis of the function of political party cadreization. Political parties are pillars of democracy. The constitution gives them the privilege of nominating leaders. However, the five-box system forces our parties to behave like companies that conduct mass recruitment without a training program. Every five years, they are "forced" to find hundreds, even thousands, of legislative candidates for three levels at once. What happens? The process becomes very transactional. Ideological cadres who have struggled for years within the party are often ousted by those who are popular or have large capital. The party becomes just an election "event organizer", which afterwards falls asleep again and is disconnected from its constituents. This weakening of party institutionalization is a serious disease that threatens the quality of the people's representatives who will sit in parliament.