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Government gets ready to assist people with mental disorders on voting day
With just over a week left before the 2024 simultaneous elections, the government has shown its commitment to assist thousands of people with mental health disorders and disabilities across Indonesia to exercise their voting rights on Feb. 14.
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A worker readies seals for ballot boxes at a logistics warehouse of the Semarang Elections Commission (KPU) in Semarang, Central Java, on Jan. 31, 2024. (Antara/Makna Zaezar)
With just over a week left before the 2024 simultaneous elections, the government has highlighted its commitment to assisting thousands of people with mental disorders or disabilities across Indonesia to exercise their voting rights on Feb. 14.
The Social Affairs Ministry is the latest to share its plan to help 820 people with mental disorders, who are all treated in the ministry’s social rehabilitation centers, to vote during the presidential and legislative elections next week.
The ministry is seeking the General Elections Commission’s (KPU) help to change the voting locations of those with mental disorders under its care so that they do not have to travel home to vote.
As for the patients who have been discharged from the rehabilitation centers, the ministry will help arrange with the poll body where they should vote.
“If they’re outside [our centers], we’ll check on who is [fit enough] to exercise their right to vote,” the secretary of the social rehabilitation directorate general at the ministry, Salahudin Yahya, said on Wednesday, as quoted by Antara.
The 2015 Regional Elections Law initially banned people who have “mental or memory problems” from casting their vote. But the Constitutional Court ruled later in the year that the provisions in question were discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The amendments to the General Election Law, which regulates presidential and legislative elections, have since removed and excluded any such provisions. The prevailing 2022 KPU regulation on what constitutes voters also describes people with mental and intellectual disabilities as eligible voters and puts them in one of six categories of disabled people in the elections.
