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Overseas Indonesians flock to polls for early voting
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Indonesian citizens register to cast their votes for the 2024 general election at the Kuala Lumpur World Trade Center in Malaysia on Feb. 11, 2024. (Antara/Rafiuddin Abdul Rahman)
H
undreds of thousands of Indonesian citizens in 120 cities around the globe have voted in the country’s 2024 general election since overseas polls began opening on Feb. 5, with numbers far exceeding expectations at some major balloting centers.
Polling stations in eight other overseas cities, including Taipei, will open either on Tuesday or Wednesday for a single day.
Electoral enthusiasm was palpable among Indonesians around the world, with crowds of voters waiting for hours from the early morning to cast their ballots.
Malaysia hosts the largest population of Indonesian citizens living abroad and has over 832,000 registered Indonesian voters.
Of the six Malaysian cities with Indonesian polling stations, Kuala Lumpur reportedly had the busiest voting period, largely a result of the many unregistered voters who showed up to vote on Sunday.
Reports that election organizers were struggling to keep up with the number of voters at Kuala Lumpur’s Putra World Trade Center (PWTC) began to emerge early on Sunday morning, and polling stations were opened earlier than scheduled to accommodate the crowds. Poll organizers also set up 300 additional registration tables to hasten the balloting process.
Set to serve some 220,000 registered voters, the two floors of the PWTC building prepared for the polling process were quickly overwhelmed, with independent election watchdogs present at the venue estimating that the number of unregistered voters was nearly the same as that of registered voters.
