Indonesia to investigate ballots pre-marked for ruling parties

INDONESIA’S election commission said it will send officials to investigate after videos were circulated online of thousands of ballots for next week’s polls scattered throughout a warehouse in neighbouring Malaysia.

One video shows police at the warehouse in Selangor state and people holding up voting papers and commenting that they had been marked in favour of President Joko Widodo and candidates for parties in his coalition.

Another video, apparently from a second location in Malaysia, shows two women making holes in ballots, which is how a vote is marked in Indonesian elections. Ilham Saputra, an election commission official, said the commission “will immediately set up a team and send its members there to ascertain what really happened”.

Presidential and legislative elections in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy after India and the US, are set for April 17.

Mr Saputra said Indonesians living in Malaysia would vote on Sunday and ballots had been sent to the country a week ago.

He said the overseas electoral commission advised that it had not rented a shophouse in Malaysia, a term for a low-rise business premises that also doubles as a residence.

Yaza Azzhara, who heads the Indonesian election monitoring committee for Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, told TVONE there were an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 ballots found in two locations.

She said that she and opposition representatives opened some of the voting papers, which were postal ballots, to find they had been marked for Mr Widodo and his running mate.

In other cases, they were marked for a Widodo-allied legislative candidate who is the son of Indonesia’s ambassador to Malaysia.

Some of the ballots were in brown bags with official overseas electoral commission padlocks and these hadn’t been marked, she said.

Mr Widodo said he had ordered an investigation into the marked ballots.