TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Voters prepare for sole candidate pair elections
Your vote counts: An official checks a ballot paper at the Denpasar Elections Commission office on Monday
Change Size
Your vote counts: An official checks a ballot paper at the Denpasar Elections Commission office on Monday. As many as 422,294 ballots are being rechecked ahead of the election of the Denpasar mayor and deputy mayor scheduled for Dec. 9.(JP/Zul Trio Anggono) (JP/Zul Trio Anggono)
Y
span class="inline inline-center">Your vote counts: An official checks a ballot paper at the Denpasar Elections Commission office on Monday. As many as 422,294 ballots are being rechecked ahead of the election of the Denpasar mayor and deputy mayor scheduled for Dec. 9.(JP/Zul Trio Anggono)
The regional election commission (KPUD) has started familiarizing the voting process to registered voters in three regions that will have a sole candidate pair in the upcoming regional elections to be held on Dec. 9 nationwide.
In East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) the familiarization program was conducted by the Timor Tengah Utara (TTU) KPUD to civil servants, community leaders and high school students, among others.
'We continue making use of any opportunity to disseminate information about the [voting] mechanism,' TTU KPUD's spokesperson Fidel Olin said over the weekend.
Fidel said the program had been conducted in 24 districts in TTU regency and presently they were continuing it at the subdistrict levels.
He added that the ballots for the sole candidate pair would contain two choices about the candidate pair: agree or not agree.
'As this is a new thing it's important for the KPUD to spread information about it to voters,' Fidel said.
The regency has Raymundus Fernandez and Aloysius Kobes as its regent and vice regent candidate pair for the election. The campaign is scheduled for Nov. 25 to Dec. 5, for the pair to win the majority of agree votes from the 166,479 registered voters.
Separately in Blitar, East Java, voters showed their enthusiasm and arrived at a polling station this weekend to participate in a simulation of the sole candidate pair regent election.
'This turns out to be easier. I did not need to wait a long time to get my turn to vote,' Sriatin, 36, a voter from Pagerwojo subdistrict, Krajan district, said on Sunday.
With only a single candidate pair, she said, voters did not need a long time to decide on their choice.
In Blitar the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) nominated pair of Rijanto-Marheinis and Urip Widodo are running unchallenged in the regional contest.
KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay said that the simulation was held to minimize mistakes that could be committed by both voters and officials at polling stations.
'Hopefully the simulation was understood well. Any shortcoming can be improved upon later,' Hadar said in Blitar.
Besides Blitar and TTU, Tasikmalaya in West Java, in the third region to have a single candidate pair.
Nine provinces and 260 regencies and cities are scheduled to have their respective regional elections this year, the first-ever to be held simultaneously nationwide.
Meanwhile in Yogyakarta, to avoid recurrent clashes between supporters of candidates, the Yogyakarta Police have prepared nine integrated patrol unit and deployed 7,000 police personnel.
'We have deployed nine units of integrated patrols to secure the elections to be held simultaneously in the three regencies,' deputy chief of Yogyakarta Police, Sr. Comr. Abdul Hasyim Gani said.
The deployment was necessary, he said, in light of the public disturbance created by candidate supporters at campaign events in Bantul and Sleman regencies on Sunday.
The brawl in Bantul was between supporters of the same PDI-P candidate pair, Sri Surya Widati- Munir, while the violence in Sleman was committed by supporters of the Sri Purnomo - Sri Muslimatun National Mandate Party candidate pair.
