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igrant Care, an NGO advocating for the rights of Indonesian workers abroad, said it will dispatch teams to monitor voting in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia amid concerns that the process could be subject to tampering.

Migrant Care executive director Anis Hidayah said on Friday that the presence of the monitoring team could put pressure on officials and election committees overseas to work more professionally.

'€œThe monitoring teams are there to ensure that officials and the Overseas Election Committee [PPLN] carry out their duties professionally and objectively,'€ she told a press conference at the General Elections Commission'€™s (KPU) headquarters in Central Jakarta on Friday.

Voting for Indonesians in Hong Kong has been scheduled for March 30, while Singapore and Malaysia will each hold voting on April 6, ahead the legislative election on April 9.

Anis said there were always risks of voting irregularities with regards to overseas voters, which could stem from a number of problems including the use of ballot boxes.

Election Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) commissioner Daniel Zuchron earlier said that the PPLN acknowledged that the use of ballot boxes were an issue.

KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay also said that it was difficult to constantly monitor the drop boxes.

'€œThe drop boxes will be directly monitored [by the PPLN] right until end of the scheduled voting day in the various countries. However, it will be difficult to carry out the task in certain places such as plantations and industrial areas, where voting may take longer than a day,'€ he said.

Hadar said that the KPU could only take measures to ensure the use of ballot boxes during voting would be transparent, and could not oversee the mail-in voting process.

Migrant Care also said it was concerned that the mail-in voting process would be susceptible to tampering.

'€œNobody has been tasked with monitoring the mail sent by overseas voters,'€ Anies said.

Besides monitoring the voting process abroad, Migrant Care has also been running a program to ensure that Indonesian migrants can exercise their voting rights.

Since January, Migrant Care has launched a campaign to educate overseas migrant workers on the voting process for the April 9 legislative election as well as holding discussions with legislative candidates, pressing them on their commitment to protect migrants'€™ rights in seven cities across the country, such as Semarang, Blitar, Ponorogo, Banyuwangi, Lombok, Lembata and Jakarta.

With the programs, especially education for overseas voters, Migrant Care expects to see a higher voter turnout for the April 9 legislative election than the 2009 election, where only 22.33 percent of 1,475,847 million registered voters cast their votes for the legislative election.