What the KPU is not telling us, and something most of us are taking for granted, is that voting in Indonesia is simple, easy and with hardly any long waiting lines. Even the most apathetic voters may find it irresistible not to visit the polling stations in their neighborhood. In many areas in Jakarta in the past, voting even turned into a rare community gathering for neighbors to catch up.

Electoral turnout in Indonesia has always been high compared with many other countries because voting has been made as easy as possible by the design of the electoral laws. Unless you go on a holiday abroad, you really have little excuse not to go out and vote.

In 2019 more than 80 percent of registered voters cast their ballot papers, a remarkable figure for a democracy where voting is voluntary and not compulsory as in neighboring Australia and Singapore. Everyone above the voting age of 17 is automatically registered, but voting is left to their discretion. You will be hard-pressed to find another democracy around the world, where voting is not mandatory, with such a high participation rate.

This year, the expectation is for another high turnout, maybe even surpassing 2019 because this time around, Indonesia will elect a new president. Incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, winner in 2014 and 2019, is not running due to the constitutional term limit.

Now let’s look at the design.

As has been the tradition with all general elections since 2004, President Jokowi has declared Feb. 14, the voting day, a public holiday. In contrast, the six elections held during the Soeharto years in 1966-1998 were held on a working day. Voters, especially civil servants, cast their ballot papers in their offices, or in polling stations near their places of work.

And it is always a Wednesday. Any other day of the week, for example, Thursday, would only encourage people, particularly those who don’t care about how the elections go, to take an extended weekend holiday by taking Friday off.

The electoral rules limit the number of registered voters to no more than 300 for each polling station, and the KPU has set up over 800,000 places across the country for people to vote. Your polling station will most likely be in your neighborhood so there is no need to travel far. For the majority, going to the polling stations is a matter of a five-minute walk or less.

Voting begins at 7 a.m. and closes at 1 p.m., so you can choose at your leisure during that six-hour period when to cast your ballot papers, never fearing there will be a long waiting line. Even if there is, you can always come back an hour later.

And you will likely find friendly and certainly familiar faces running the polling stations. They are your neighbors volunteering their time and energy to administer the votes.

The success of Indonesia’s election, if success means that voting proceeds smoothly and a high turnout, depends largely on the work of these volunteers, all of them recruited locally from the neighborhoods. With each polling station manned by nine people, including two in charge of security, more than 7.2 million ordinary citizens are running the polling stations.

After voting closes at 1 p.m., the polling station workers will take a lunch break. In some communities, this will be turned into a potluck gathering, and a chance to catch up with neighbors.

At 2 p.m., they begin opening the ballot boxes, one at a time. Some neighbors may want to stay and follow the counting process, cheering or jeering at the read-out of each ballot paper, all in a good neighborliness spirit, nothing like the harsh words exchanged on social media.

Voters cast their ballot papers by punching the photo of their chosen candidate. This is true for each of the five ballot papers: president/vice president, the House of Representatives, the Regional Representatives Body (Senate) and the two local councils at provincial and regency/mayoralty level.

Most likely, neighbors will stay for the counting of the presidential election, usually the first to be unboxed.

At almost all polling stations there will be official witnesses hired by the candidates or political parties, who will stay until all the votes in the five ballot boxes are counted. In rare instances, these official witnesses will demand a recount. Their report to their headquarters is an important and effective mechanism to prevent manipulation of the vote counts at the KPU.

After the votes are counted and tabulated, the ballot papers are put back in their respective boxes, and the reports are sent to the KPU. Typically, they will finish their work well past midnight.

At the KPU headquarters, all these ballot boxes will be opened and the ballot papers will be counted manually. This is why the official results of the election will not be announced for at least another month. But quick counts by independent but verified institutions will begin announcing their results as early as the evening of Feb. 14. In the past, most of them got it right, so we will almost know the results long before the KPU finishes the counting.

In 2019 for the first time, the presidential and legislative elections were held simultaneously rather than in separate months. Running the polling stations took its toll, particularly on the older volunteers because of the long hours involved. More than 700 polling workers died, and thousands became ill either from exhaustion, a heart attack or a stroke. Learning from that lesson, this time the KPU sets an age limit of 55 years for anyone volunteering to run a polling station.

With easy and fast voting, the main challenge facing voters is the question of who to vote for. Most already know who they want to be the next president, but many have little clue who they want to represent them in the House, the Senate and the two local councils. Banners with photos of the candidates displayed on the streets in the past month will have only confused them even more. The large ballot papers will feature some 40 to 50 photos of candidates they hardly know.

Many of these candidates are not from the neighborhood or even from the same city. Why then, would then people be expected to give their votes to complete strangers?

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The writer is senior editor of The Jakarta Post, who headed a polling station in Jakarta in 2019.