IINDONESIA: From sending ballot boxes by elephant in Sumatra to keeping voters safe in Papua’s rebel territory, Indonesia is pulling out all the stops for one of the world’s biggest one-day polls across a vast archipelago of 260 million.On Wednesday, over 190 million registered voters in the Muslim-majority country will cast their votes in just eight hours of polling, with the election commission battling torrential downpours, voter fraud and damaging cyber attacks.And if that wasn’t hard enough, the world’s third-largest democracy behind India and the United States is staging a first for its two-decade-old system, which rose from the ashes of a military-backed dictatorship: holding presidential, parliamentary and local polls all in one day.“This is a very big country so we’ll do our best,” Arief Budiman, the commission’s chief, told a recent gathering of journalists and diplomats.
