Amid the din of self-promoting campaigns, zealous supporters and rampant misinformation, Indonesia’s pollsters are gearing up to offer credible ways to predict the results of one of the world’s most complicated general elections to be held this year.

Several polling organizations are preparing to employ quick counts for the Feb. 14 polls, a vote sampling method that observers insist remains an accountable way to offer preliminary results while the election organizers brace for a painstaking month of manual canvassing to determine the winners of the 2024 race.

More than 205 million voters are expected to head to the polling station on Valentine’s Day to elect the next president and vice president, as well as legislators at the national and regional levels.

Once polling closes, people will enter what might be a long wait for the official election results from the General Elections Commission (KPU). The vote counting process, which is lengthy and laborious, may take up to 35 days to be completed, the maximum time regulated by the Elections Law.

The public however can expect numerous early vote count results based on the vote sampling method, as registered private polling and survey institutions are gearing up to deploy thousands of volunteers and staff to polling stations nationwide.

A quick count is a statistical method that analyzes vote tallies of sampled polling stations to forecast the election results. Under the prevailing law, early vote sampling results can be announced two hours after polling in western Indonesia closes at 1 p.m.

Such pollsters include Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Cyrus Network, which will be working in collaboration to conduct a quick count and reveal the result as early as 5 to 6 p.m. in western Indonesia.

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