Indonesia prepares for mega polls
BANDAR LAMPUNG, Indonesia: Indonesia will hold one of the world’s biggest one-day elections next week — a mind-boggling feat that involves shifting votes by boat, plane and horseback across the vast archipelago of more than 278 million people.
On Wednesday, nearly 205 million will be eligible to vote in presidential, parliamentary and regional polls in just six hours of voting, with officials preparing for possible rainy season downpours, cyberattacks and fraud.
The election will be held across three time zones, beginning in easternmost province Papua where rebels are waging a deadly insurgency against the military.
Behind India and the United States, Indonesia is the world’s third-largest democracy.
It is only the fifth presidential election since the country emerged from autocratic rule less than three decades ago.
“The logistics distribution and the voting will happen in the rainy season,” general election commission chairman Hasyim Asyari told reporters last year.
Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto is running against former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan and former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo for the top office.
Beneath them, more than 19,000 seats will be up for grabs in around 2,700 electoral districts for the regional vote, while 580 parliamentary seats will be contested by 18 parties.
Thousands of volunteers have been called on to organize ballot papers, and 800,000 polling stations will be manned by more than five million volunteers.
Around 1.7 million overseas voters have already started casting their ballots.
Officials have been distributing ballot boxes under armed guard to every corner of the 5,000-kilometer-long (3,106-mile-long) archipelago that is home to hundreds of ethnic groups and languages.
In Sumatra’s Aceh province, a provincial election official told AFP that organizers were still deciding whether to use elephants to carry ballot boxes again after commandeering several tuskers for the task in the 2019 election.
Horses will be used in a southeast corner of Java island, where officials have prepared at least three trusty stallions to bring ballots to a remote village of just 160 people in case of bad weather.
Speedboats will take ballots from Jakarta to islands off the Javan coast, while the military said warships have been enlisted to help deliver ballots.
In Papua, security will be tight in mountainous areas as separatists continue to carry out attacks against government employees and civilians.
Elsewhere. the country’s elite counter-terror unit has arrested dozens of suspects accused of plotting to disrupt the vote. The country’s cybersecurity agency has created an election task force to protect the vote against hacking.