🇮🇩 Polls (almost) open for 100 million

Calls to delay again amid case surge go unanswered

Hello friends!

Today we’re taking a quick look at Indonesia’s regional elections to be held on Wednesday. 

Usually, I love elections — especially in Indonesia where pesta demokrasi is more of a promise than a challenge (the argy-bargy comes late). This time around though feels very different.

We’ll have a quick look at how it works before jumping into the COVID stuff. I’ll be back for an update on winners and losers probably next week and we’ll have to get into the dynasty stuff properly once a certain son picks up a certain seat in Solo, as is expected.  Will have to get the corruption cases in there too. Jeeze a lot is happening.

I also really liked the recent episode of On the Level with Jeff Hutton speaking with Reformasi’s Kevin O’Rourke.

Stay safe out there friends
Erin Cook

Regional elections sound little but it’s huuuuuge. Around 100 million voters are eligible to pick nine governors, over 200 district heads and 37 mayors. Wikipedia has this super handy map that shows who exactly in the archipelago is voting. 

Maksih, wiki!

Green is this year, while the reds voted in 2018 and blue (that’s Jakarta!) in 2017. Holy heck it’s a big country. Like, we know that. But when you see it like this and it’s still 100 million voting this week it blows my tiny parochial brain! 

But unlike the other two days, this one will be very different from the pandemic front and centre.

For instance, let’s look at this quick run of stories from the Jakarta Globe last week:

Each headline individually is terrifying, but the combination has my stomach sinking into ever deeper levels I didn’t know was there.

Calls to delay the vote have been loud since COVID-19 first (officially) reached Indonesia. Polls were initially set for September but by June had been pushed back to this week. The reasoning then was to afford the public health response, electoral bodies and the various parties to get themselves together and assumed Indonesia’s pandemic would be better off now than it would be in September. 

As our little screencap and daily Nuice Media updates show us — that is very much not the case. Daily case counts are hovering between 5,000 and 6,000 a day. There has been some speculation that more stringent public health measures will come in post-election, with, like many countries which have or will hold elections during the pandemic, the governments of various levels accused of putting politicking ahead of safety.

Elections are expected to be a super-spreader event, like any large community event during this time. What’s particularly worrying though is the elections are already responsible for several clusters before a single ballot has been cast. 

Central Java election officials report 800 poll station workers have tested positive to COVID-19, with others refusing to be tested. The KPU says new workers will be hired to replace those down and out and tested before taking on duties, but it hardly inspires confidence. 

Not just workers, but candidates too. Back in early October, the KPU announced three candidates had died after contracting COVID-19. The Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) called then for a delay of the vote noting that, in addition to the deaths, at least 63 candidate pairings — and this is in October, mind — had picked up the virus potentially turning tickets into clusters. 

More than the results, I’ll be interested to see the impact on Indonesia’s famously high turn-out rates. I hope our next update will just be about who won and who lost and not a terrible look at new clusters and skyrocketing numbers. Safe voting, everyone!

Further reading

• Regional elections: Between democracy and people’s lives (The Jakarta Post)

Despite those precautionary measures, questions still linger as to whether the elections will not worsen COVID-19 transmission, given the fact that some regions that will host elections are listed as high-risk. Some countries that held in-person voting did show a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases right after the election, including Belarus, Poland and Serbia.

More than 50 countries and territories, including Austria, France and Burundi, have canceled or postponed national and subnational elections due to the pandemic. Other countries decided to proceed with their elections with some conditions: 1) people are at low risk because the COVID-19 transmission curve is flattening; 2) mechanisms of voting other than in-person balloting are in place such as digital voting or via post; or 3) a combination of the two as happened in Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.