<![CDATA[Indonesia’s electoral constitutional framework has significantly changed following Constitutional Court Decision No. 135/PUU-XXII/2024, which mandates the separation of National and Local Elections beginning in 2029. Although intended to improve electoral governance and democratic representation, the decision raises fundamental questions concerning the limits of judicial authority in redesigning electoral institutions. Existing scholarship largely examines simultaneous elections from the perspectives of electoral management, democratic participation, or judicial review, but pays limited attention to judicial law-making and its implications for electoral constitutionalism. This study examines how the decision reconstructs Indonesia’s constitutional electoral design, assesses the constitutional legitimacy of the Court’s intervention, and develops a normative framework governing the relationship between judicial review and legislative policymaking. Employing normative legal research, it combines statutory, case, conceptual, comparative, and constitutional interpretation approaches, drawing on constitutional provisions, legislation, Constitutional Court decisions, and contemporary scholarship. The findings reveal a constitutional shift from simultaneous elections to differentiated electoral sequencing through separate national and local electoral cycles. The Court has moved beyond its traditional role as a negative legislator by exercising constitutionally bounded judicial law-making that functions as constitutional engineering while remaining grounded in constitutional interpretation. As its principal theoretical contribution, this article proposes the Judicial Electoral Constitutionalism Framework (JECF), comprising five principles—constitutional limits, legislative policy, democratic representation, institutional stability, and electoral integrity—to evaluate the legitimacy of judicial intervention in electoral reform and guide future revisions of Indonesia’s Election and Regional Election Laws.]]>
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