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Enthusiastic voters enliven elections, boost turnout
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A woman casts her vote at a pooling station during the presidential election in Trumon, Southern Aceh province on April 17, 2019. (AFP/Chaideer Mahyuddin)
T
ens of millions of voters turned up at polling stations on Wednesday in what observers dubbed the largest one-day election in the democratic world.
Voters got to choose a president and vice president, as well as legislative representatives at the subnational levels on the day. Some 195 million people were declared eligible to vote and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies-Cyrus Network indicated that voter turnout reached 82 percent.
Some people had their own way of enlivening the day and to lure voters to show up at polling stations.
Organizers in Depok, West Java, decorated their polling stations with a variety of themes and events.
The themes included Kampung Nusantara (village archipelago) as a way to depict the country’s rich and diverse culture, while another station sought to emulate the Presidential Palace with its decorations and black suits.
RW 03 community unit head Nuryadin Rahman said 11 neighborhood units (RT) in Depok Jaya subdistrict decorated their polling stations to depict Javanese, Sundanese, Betawi, Minang, Batak and Balinese cultures. The polling station workers there wore the traditional attire of the represented cultures and held voting in visually diverse tents reflecting the cultures.
Maximizing voter turnout was top priority for polling station officers, Nuryadin said. “We want to celebrate our cultural diversity through this event so that voters will be persuaded to come and cast their ballot.”
