Prized boxes
Over 190 million voters will cast their votes today in just eight hours of polling
(Indonesia): From sending ballot boxes by elephants in Sumatra to keeping voters safe in Papua’s rebel territory, Indonesia is pulling out all the stops for one of the world’s biggest one-day polls across a vast archipelago of 260 million.
Today, over 190 million registered voters in the Muslim-majority country will cast their votes in just eight hours of polling, with the election commission battling torrential downpours, voter fraud and damaging cyber attacks.
And if that wasn’t hard enough, the world’s third-largest democracy behind India and the United States is staging a first for its two-decadeold system, which rose from the ashes of a military-backed dictatorship: holding presidential, parliamentary and local polls all in one day.
“This is a very big country so we’ll do our best,” Arief Budiman, the commission’s chief, said. “But we’re very busy this year.”
He’s not kidding.
Calling on four-legged transport, motorbikes, speedboats and planes, officials have been distributing cardboard ballot boxes – guarded by armed security staff – to every corner of the 4,800km-long archipelago, which is home to hundreds of ethnic groups and languages.
While elephants carried ballot boxes through Sumatra’s Aceh province, horses were used to reach remote communities in the southeast corner of Java island.
“The path is muddy during the rainy season so we need to use horses to transport election material,” said Suhartanto, the police chief in Tempurejo sub-district, who goes by one name.
The lightweight ballot boxes – replacing metal ones used in previous polls – are up to the job, Budiman insisted, declaring them to be “very strong”.
“You can sprinkle water on them – but not a flood,” he said.
This was confirmed this week near Jakarta when hundreds of spoiled boxes were left in a muddy heap after torrential rain flooded a storage warehouse.
A record 245,000 candidates are vying for public office, with current president Joko Widodo facing off against ex-general Prabowo Subianto for the top job.
The polls kick off early today at over 800,000 plus ballot stations staffed by millions of election officials, starting in easternmost Papua where a separatist insurgency has simmered for decades.
Security will be tight in parts of the mountainous region after rebels massacred more than a dozen employees at a state-backed contractor in December.
Violence also erupted as election material was delivered before local polls last year, resulting in the deaths of several police and election officials.
But armed rebels aren’t the only election challenge in Papua, which shares an island border with independent Papua New Guinea.
Voters in parts of the mineral-rich region use a communal voting system called “noken”, in which a village head collects votes and represents the group at the ballot box.
It is a challenge to the concept of direct voting and a headache for local officials who have tried – and failed – to change the fraud-prone system in a country where vote buying is already rife.
“Usually, voters choose candidates who are from their village or family,” said Papua’s election commission head Theodorus Kossay.
“Also, what often happens is that the number of votes that are actually filed can be different from what was agreed upon by the group, which leads to cheating.”