T

he managements of two major hospitals in Denpasar stated Tuesday they would not make a special effort to help their patients vote on Thursday.

The decision is bad news for patients who want to vote but are unable to leave the hospital setting due to their medical condition. In previous elections, patients could use special voting stations established in hospital premises. However, last month the General Elections Commission (KPU) canceled plans to establish such stations.

"We don't have any policies in place to allow patients to vote. It all depends on the KPU. We only deal with our staff's needs. We have informed them they may leave work briefly to vote," Sanglah Hospital's director of general affairs and operations, Triputro Nugroho, said.

Sanglah Hospital, the island's largest medical facility, has 700 available beds with a daily average of 500 inpatients. It is staffed by 200 medical workers.

In the last legislative elections, as many as 500 inpatients, as well as patients' relatives and hospital staff members voted at the special voting station inside the hospital's sprawling compound.

Triputro could not estimate the number of inpatients and their relatives who would not be able to vote in the upcoming elections. He believed there would still be 500 inpatients by Thursday.

Each inpatient is typically accompanied by up to four relatives throughout their stay.

Therefore there could be up to 2,000 registered voters unable to vote at Sanglah Hospital alone.

The management of Wangaya Hospital issued a similar statement.

"We haven't arranged any meetings concerning special voting stations," Wangaya Hospital's head of media relations Ketut Sutikayasa said.

The hospital currently treats 104 inpatients.

Sanglah and Wangaya are the preferred hospitals for the city's low- to middle- income families. The high-income families tend to go to privately run hospitals, of which there are more than 10.

The head of the Denpasar Regional Election Commission (KPUD), I Made Gde Ray Misno, said the decision to scrap special voting stations in hospitals was made by the central KPU in Jakarta.

"It is a national policy. The current election system underlines the active participation of the voters to register themselves and to vote in their respective regions," he said.

He admitted the new policy might hurt voter turnout, but said the inpatients and their relatives could still cast their votes at the nearest available voting stations.

"But they must produce a letter from their native voting stations and show that letter to voting station officials," he said.

Nila Wahyuni, an inpatient at Wangaya Hospital, said she was surprised to learn there would be no voting station at the hospital this year.

"I have the right to vote and this policy has robbed me of that right," she said.

A relative of the patient, I Kadek Asta Astawa, said the KPU's national policy discriminated against the sick in the electoral process.