In July 2026, Rahmat Bagja, chairman of Indonesia’s General Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu), made a candid admission: the country’s electoral framework has yet to explicitly regulate artificial intelligence in election campaigns. AI-generated content, anonymous accounts and coordinated digital activity are already making it harder to identify who is responsible for political messaging. The admission therefore matters well beyond Bawaslu.
It points to a question every public institution now faces: what happens when technology develops faster than the institutions responsible for governing it? The eagerness to embrace new technologies does not guarantee the readiness to govern their consequences. Indonesia’s electoral supervision shows how this gap plays out in practice.
Bawaslu faces two demands at once. It must respond to technologies that increasingly shape electoral activity, from artificial intelligence to algorithmic amplification and digitally coordinated political communication, dynamics my co-authors and I examined in a 2025 study of social media buzzers. At the same time, it is expected to adopt technological innovations to make its own supervision more effective and efficient. Adopting new tools, however, is not the same as having the rules, capacities and safeguards to use them well.
This tension exposes three interconnected challenges. First, regulatory voids open up when existing laws cannot accommodate practices their drafters never anticipated. Second, institutional eagerness to adopt new technologies can outrun organisational readiness and accountability. Third, legal harmonisation, the process meant to keep regulations consistent across institutions, remains largely opaque: the public can see its outcomes, but not the considerations that shape them.
Regulatory voids and the limits of electoral supervision
A regulatory void does not mean an absence of law. Indonesia’s electoral regulations already govern campaign activities and prohibit certain forms of conduct. The problem arises when new technological practices do not fit neatly within established legal definitions, responsibilities and enforcement procedures.
Consider AI-generated political content spread through anonymous accounts. Even when such content threatens electoral integrity, supervisors must still establish who produced it, whether it falls within their authority, which provisions apply and how evidence can be obtained. Technology opens new possibilities for political communication; it also makes existing rules harder to apply.
This is a familiar dilemma of regulatory governance. Regulators are expected to maintain order in sectors they understand, yet emerging technologies increasingly place the relevant technical knowledge and operational capabilities beyond their institutional reach, a problem scholars of AI governance have examined at length.
When adoption moves faster than readiness
The pressure to adapt does not stop at regulating political actors. It also shapes how supervisory institutions modernise themselves.
During the 2024 elections, Bawaslu developed digital reporting systems, including Siwaslu and Siwaslih, to speed up and coordinate supervision. In a country where elections unfold across geographically diverse regions and involve large numbers of supervisory personnel, such initiatives matter.
Yet their implementation also exposed the gap between technological ambition and institutional readiness. Evaluations found the applications difficult to access during periods of peak demand, a problem compounded by uneven internet connectivity and the limited devices available to supervisors. Effective adoption, in other words, depends not only on the sophistication of a digital system but on the institutional conditions needed to sustain it.
These were not simply technological failures. They point to a broader governance problem: what happens when the ambition to digitalise moves faster than an organisation’s readiness?
Technology adoption is usually measured by the applications launched, the number of users or the speed of digital reporting. None of these indicators shows whether an institution has the infrastructure, technical competence, contingency procedures and accountability arrangements to sustain its systems. An application can be fully operational and still hard to use in regions with poor connectivity. A sophisticated monitoring system can generate information more efficiently without improving an institution’s capacity to interpret that information or act on it.
The distinction matters because technology is a means of strengthening public institutions, not an achievement in itself. Institutional readiness should be assessed before technologies are deployed at scale, not treated as a problem to fix once difficulties emerge.
Opening the black box of legal harmonisation
Readiness is not only a matter of infrastructure and personnel. It is also a matter of whether the legal framework itself can adjust to technological change. In Indonesia, that adjustment runs through legal harmonisation, the process meant to ensure that regulations issued by different government institutions are consistent with existing laws and do not overlap with one another’s authority.
On paper, the process is well defined. Minister of Law Regulation No. 7 of 2026 sets out several stages, including administrative examination, harmonisation meetings, approval and the submission of results. But a defined procedure is not the same as a transparent one. The public may know when harmonisation takes place and which institutions take part. How competing legal interpretations, institutional interests and regulatory priorities are reconciled is another matter entirely.
This raises a harder question about the relationship between harmonisation and political will. If harmonisation exists to ensure legal consistency, how far do political priorities determine how quickly regulations are drafted and finalised? Differences in regulatory timelines may reflect legal complexity, administrative requirements or the demands of inter-agency coordination. But they also invite the question of whether some regulations receive greater attention because they are politically urgent, rather than because they are legally or socially important.
Bawaslu’s own experience offers a window onto this relationship. In July 2025, the agency held a harmonisation meeting with the Ministry of Law, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the General Elections Commission (KPU) on the continuous supervision of voter data. The meeting shows the inter-agency coordination that electoral regulation requires. But recording that a meeting took place is not the same as making its deliberations accessible. The public is left asking how competing institutional positions are negotiated, which considerations take precedence and how those choices shape the final regulation.
These questions grow more pressing when regulators must respond to socially disruptive technologies. New technologies create new regulatory demands, but urgency does not automatically translate into equivalent political and institutional commitment. Regulatory voids may therefore persist not only because innovation outpaces the law, but because regulatory safeguards receive different levels of institutional priority.
The answer is not simply to speed up harmonisation, but to make the process itself more transparent and accountable. Publishing regulatory drafts, substantive changes and the reasoning behind regulatory decisions would help the public distinguish genuine legal constraints from institutional or political priorities. Without such transparency, harmonisation risks becoming a black box: the final regulations are visible, but the decisions that shaped them escape scrutiny.
From adoption to accountable institutionalisation
Bawaslu’s experience shows that governing new technologies cannot be reduced to issuing new regulations or accelerating adoption. Both matter, but neither works without the organisational capacity, regulatory safeguards and accountability mechanisms to sustain them. Without these, innovation remains an institutional ambition rather than a genuine improvement in public governance.
For Bawaslu, this means acting on two fronts. As a supervisor, it must strengthen its capacity to respond to technological practices that existing rules do not adequately cover. As an adopter, it must assess its own readiness, particularly its infrastructure, personnel capabilities and accountability procedures, so that new systems strengthen electoral supervision rather than create new operational vulnerabilities.
Regulatory development must change too. Legal harmonisation should be treated not merely as an administrative safeguard against contradictory regulations, but as an opportunity to show how institutional responsibilities, legal interpretations and public interests are reconciled. Greater transparency would let citizens judge whether regulations are shaped by legal requirements, institutional priorities or wider political considerations. The point is not to separate political will from regulation entirely, but to keep its influence open to public scrutiny and accountability.
Most fundamentally, institutions must shift their focus from technological adoption to accountable institutionalisation. Adoption is about introducing and using new tools. Institutionalisation requires embedding those tools in established organisational practices, regulatory responsibilities and accountability arrangements. Success should be judged not only by how quickly an institution embraces innovation, but by how well it can understand, evaluate and govern the consequences.
These lessons reach well beyond Bawaslu. As new technologies reshape public administration and society, other government institutions will face the same tension between technological ambition and institutional preparedness. Meeting it requires more than responsive regulations or sophisticated digital infrastructure. It requires an environment in which technological experimentation comes with regulatory clarity, meaningful public participation and mechanisms that allow decisions to be questioned and evaluated. The question, then, is not whether public institutions should embrace technological innovation, but how they can ensure it serves the public they answer to. Technology may well move faster than the institutions that govern it. The rush to adopt, however, must not come at the expense of institutional readiness, regulatory accountability and public trust. Indonesia’s challenge is not merely to keep pace with technological change, but to build institutions capable of governing it responsibly.
Contributor:
Stefanus Anggara Hagata is a researcher at Dignity Indonesia and Program Monitoring and Evaluation Lead of Anak Teknologi (Antek) Indonesia.
