Representatives from 30 countries will be directly keeping tabs on Election Day in Indonesia, the world'€™s third-biggest democratic country.

General Elections Commission (KPU) commissioner Ferry Kurnia Rizkiyansyah said on Tuesday that 154 people from 30 countries had registered with the commission to observe voting on April 9.

'€œThey will only visit places like Bandung, West Java and Surabaya, East Java,'€ he told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting between the KPU and the foreign visitors at the commission'€™s headquarters.

However, these foreign visitors will not act as official election observers like in previous elections. '€œThey will not record or monitor [the polling stations] intensively. They just wanted to learn more about our officers'€™ work on the field,'€ Ferry said. '€œThey wanted to compare [with the elections in their countries].'€

In the 2004 elections, for example, several foreign monitoring teams such as The Carter Center, the Washington-based National Democratic Institute and the European Union sent observers to Indonesia. In 2004, Jimmy Carter, former US president and founder of The Carter Center, along with other monitoring team leaders, praised Indonesia and said that overall, the electoral process was honest and transparent.

According to the KPU'€™s list of accredited election observers, all of the institutions are based in Indonesia and the majority of them are headquartered in Jakarta.

Some of the organizations are the Independent Election Monitoring Committee (KIPP), Migrant Care, the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), the Partnership for Governance Reform (Kemitraan) and the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem).

KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay said that for a foreign organization to become a registered election observer, it had to meet several requirements such as obtaining a visa and recommendation from the Indonesian government and was obligated to make a report. '€œBut as visitors, they only wanted to see. There is no need to make a report and they also cannot publish their opinions on what they see. But if they want to publish their reports internally, then it is their right to do so,'€ he said.

Some of the countries sending delegates to polling stations are Australia, Finland, Slovakia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, Spain, Libya, China, Timor Leste, Thailand, Pakistan, Malaysia, Russia, the US and Bangladesh.

Perludem, which will coordinate seven delegates from China, two from the US and one from Bangladesh, said that the delegates were eager to be spectators.

'€œThey were surprised that Indonesia was holding such a complicated election. For them, the size of the election in Indonesia is astounding,'€ Perludem executive director Titi Anggraini said, adding that Indonesia had the second-largest centralized final voter list (DPT) in the world, trailing only behind the US.

One of the visitors, Alexandra Snoy, the director of Spanish IT company PT Indra Indonesia, said that she could not wait to witness voting day.

'€œWe are very interested in the process, to see how technology can increase transparency and speed up the counting process. We are very eager to compare and see if we can collaborate in anyway [with the KPU in future elections],'€ she said.

While Alexandra said that the democratic process in Indonesia had been going well as far as she could see from past regional elections that she had observed in Indonesia, she said it could still be improved.

'€œWe can see that the recapitulation process is very long, as your commissioner said before, he said it was about one month and it is quite long. Maybe technology can be applied to speed up this process and it will be safer for the general public and increase transparency,'€ she said.

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