Vote-buying brokers will be busy in the hours just before polling stations open today for Indonesia's parliamentary elections.
In operations dubbed "dawn attacks," middlemen across the vast country will go from door to door offering money for votes for clients ranging from major political parties to first-time candidates, analysts and watchdog groups say.
PHOTO: AFP
"We offer 100,000 rupiah (US$11.66) face to face to the voter and we threaten a bit to warn them not to fool us," one Jakarta-based broker who declined to be identified said.
"But we need to be careful as nowadays people are smarter and, if we step on their toes, they will scream," he said, adding that he aims to get one-third of the votes in one of his targeted polling stations.
More than 147 million Indonesians are eligible to vote in 585,000 polling stations to choose representatives for the 550-seat national parliament, the newly established regional representative council and their respective local legislatures.
The dawn attacks are just the final and least subtle effort to win votes through incentives.
In the formal campaign period that ended last week, parties and candidates tried to attract voters with giveaways ranging from rice and radios to cigarettes and hard cash.
With one credible recent survey showing one-third of voters still undecided and even the top party, Golkar, garnering well under that, election watchers and some contestants fear the dawn attacks could become a wild-card factor.
Golkar was the political vehicle of former Indonesian president Mohamed Suharto, who ruled with an iron fist for 32 years until his downfall in 1998.
In this election, Indonesia's old-guard party has tried to distance itself from the negative side of Suharto's rule while playing on memories of rapid economic growth and stability.
Recent surveys have Golkar breaking away from its closest rival, incumbent Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri's PDI-P, after the polls showed the two neck-and-neck for months, but it still is winning barely more than 20 percent of the vote.
Legislator Rully Chairul Azwar, Golkar's point man in this year's elections, knows victory is still uncertain.
"Polls have forecast that we will be the winner and the campaign has heartened us. But the dawn attacks can be a dangerous element in the last stretch," said Azwar, Golkar's main campaign secretary.
Amien Rais, one of Megawati's rivals for the top job in the July 5 presidential vote, told his National Mandate Party supporters to outsmart the brokers.
"If you are bribed, take the money because it's actually yours. The distributed cash is public funds that have been corrupted," he said.
The General Election Commission (KPU) supported the call.
"The dawn attacks hit us bad in 1999 but our people now know better. They'll take the money and pick another party. Nobody knows the choice in the booth," said KPU chief Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin, referring to the last time Indonesians voted.
Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said almost all parties would use vote-buying tactics to secure votes.
"Some wait until the results are out first before they pay up. Some don't want to pay in full in advance anymore."
The combination of blatant and subtle tactics was apparent in the 20-day campaigning period, in which most of the 24 contesting parties paid people to people to attend rallies in order to swell the turnout.
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
RSS