60 Percent of Voters Still Don’t Know the Design for the 2019 National Elections

According to the survey conducted by Polling Center and the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), out of four hundred respondents which located in Sumatera, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Bali, Nusa Tenggara, and Eastern Indonesia, 60 percent of them do not know the design for the 2019 Concurrent National Elections. Two percent of respondents do not know that the legislative elections and presidential election will be held on the same day. 58 percent of respondents think that presidential and legislative elections will be held on different days.

“Majority of voters don’t know that presidential and legislative elections will be held on the same day. This means the media need to inform the voters more massively,” says a researcher from Polling Center, Henny Susilawati, in Jakarta (03/16).

A researcher from Perludem, Heroik Pratama, says that voters should also be informed on the advantage and disadvantage of concurrent election. For example, voters need to be informed that in a concurrent election they will have to receive five ballots to be cast out in voting booth. Policy makers need to make sure that voters will not become confuse because of this.

“We need to make sure that this will not make voters confuse. In an electoral area, a voter need to vote one candidate out of total 332. How well does the voter know about all of those candidates? Meanwhile, we often demand voters to be more rational,” says Heroik.

Heroik argues that policy makers should make things easy for the voters. For example, Heroik says, policy makers may want to divide concurrent elections into two: concurrent national elections and concurrent local elections.