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Voters vandalize ballots to air frustration over politicians
In South Tangerang, Bawaslu also discovered that voters had scribbled satirical messages on the ballots. On one ballot, a voter wrote “ALL OF YOU ARE CORRUPT” above the photo of candidate pair Benjamin Davnie and Pilar Saga.
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A screenshot of a Twitter post showing a vandalized ballot in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, on Dec. 9, 2020. (JP/-)
W
hile some Indonesians might have a long list of worries that could keep them from voting during a pandemic, some others could not wait to escape quarantine on a Wednesday morning and stage a “protest” against the candidates or the political system.
The Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) has reported that it has found some voters in various regions abstained by vandalizing ballots during this year’s simultaneous regional elections.
In Kediri, East Java, for example, while there was only one pair of candidates running in the regental election, the ballots left some room for some voters to express their sentiment.
In a blank column beside the pictures of candidate pair Hanindhito Himawan Pramana and Dewi Maria Ulfa, supposedly provided to vote for a formal abstention, Bawaslu found some unusual images, including a photo of SUGA of Korean boy band BTS.
“There was a unique incident; voters pasted a picture in an empty column on a single candidate ballot paper. I didn’t know who the artist was, some Korean star,” Bawaslu official Mochammad Afifuddin said in a press conference on Wednesday, as livestreamed on the agency’s YouTube channel.
In a separate polling station in Kediri, Bawaslu found a photo of an unknown person wearing dark glasses also attached to the blank column of the ballot paper.
Running unchallenged, Hanindhito, a 28-year-old businessman and the son of Cabinet secretary Pramono Anung, made strides in the Kediri election, securing more than 70 percent of the votes sampled, a quick count showed as of Wednesday night.
