It is encouraging to hear about how long lines are forming up in the United States as we speak, which would indicate enthusiasm for Democratic voters. However, at the same time, as an observer from Indonesia, it is also amusing to me that it occurs at all. I understand how the Republicans have been a force that wants to make voting difficult in various ways, especially in areas where Democrats usually perform well. Besides, there are fifty different election system in the United States. All this makes it quite complicated to explain to my compatriots here in Indonesia how election works in US.
So on this occasion, I thought I would like to offer fellow Kossacks a glimpse of how election day is conducted in Indonesia. Now, I am not saying that the election in Indonesia is perfect. Just quickly, the seat partitioning system for the legislative assembly gives immense power to political party leaders, and there are some issues with voters list and with far-reaching villages in valley mountains and tribalism in remote areas. However, I do think that the election day system itself is something that at least others can learn from.
First, election day is a national holiday
With some exceptions, nothing is open on the morning of election day. Election itself is conducted between 7am to 1pm. 12am is usually reserved to accept votes from non-registered voters or some special instances of voting, which still have some issues to this day. It means that there is no early voting. Even so, in the last general election of 2019, Indonesian election managed to have 81.93% turnout. Businesses like shops and restaurants open around 11am or later, giving the chance for workers to vote first in the morning. But how to make sure that they have enough time to vote?
Polling stations are designed to handle between 200 to 500 voters
Aside from non-registered voters who flock on 12am to try to vote, there are usually no long lines forming. In my personal experience, the longest I have ever waited for is around 15 to 20 minutes. This means that there are a lot of polling places in the whole of Indonesia — 809,500 stations handling 192,800,000 registered voters. How do we get the manpower to conduct election?
National holiday for elections means plenty of volunteers
There are no shortage of volunteers to man the polling stations. Each polling stations usually have at least 6 people manning them: two who holds the list of voters, two who actually distributes the paper ballot, one who mans the ink station (for your pinky once you’re done voting!), and one who directs everything. These people are my neighbors, with some political party observers hanging on and usually one staff from the election commission (this staff usually oversee several polling stations in an area).
It’s all paper ballot
Nothing fancy, just a paper ballot and a nail provided on the polling booth to stick through. In the last election where we picked five seats, we got five pieces of papers folded. It’s crude, it’s simple, but in my humble opinion very effective and not prone to mistakes. There’s no mail in ballot though, so you do have to go to the polling stations. However, since there are plenty of these stations about, most of them are accessible by foot.
Counting is done on 1pm and witnessed by… you!
If you have the whole day with nothing better to do, you could actually stay in the polling station after 1pm where they count the votes immediately. It has become a lively affair where people can boo and cheer for each name being called out. At 1pm, the ballot box is opened together and the results are tabulated by two (or three) people to make sure the counting is correct. There is little chance of cheating because each paper is being held up high for people to see, called out loud by the first person, and checked by the second person (unless the whole volunteers in the polling station conspired to miscount the whole ballot). Once done, they will then double check the tabulation papers to check the count done by the two persons, and then it is certified. They will then put one copy on the wall for anyone to see and take picture if they so please. However, in the 2019 election, with legislative, presidential, and local government election being held at the same time, tabulation process became a problem since it took a long time to count everything.
Tabulation result of each polling station is posted on a tabulation website
Once you know the result of the voting in your polling station, you can check that into the website the commission set up to tabulate the votes. Any mistakes will then be quickly caught because anyone could check what’s listed in the website against the actual count in the polling station. If there is any dispute, the ballot papers are not destroyed. They are collected in the ballot boxes and locked incase of any future election dispute until the result are not disputed and certified.
So that was just a short summary on how Indonesia conducted the largest one day single system election in the world somehow successfully (India conducts election by provinces and US has multiple systems conducted by each state). I welcome you to dig deeper for details if you want to, and apologies before hand if I made any mistake in my portrayal of the election. Again, it is not perfect, with many issues that need solving. However, perhaps it might be an inspiration to improve how election is conducted, even if it means one of the oldest democracy in the world is learning from one of the younger ones. At the very least, hopefully in the future a long line forming would not be considered a good news for either party.
