Waiting

The last few days around here have all us all waiting with baited breath. The Indonesian Presidential Election went smoothly on Wednesday, July 9th, which is quite impressive considering the logistical challenge of getting the ballots to all 190 million possible voters.

By the end of the day though we had both candidates announcing themselves as the winners. The official results won’t be released until July 22nd, so instead most people rely on quick count results. These are done by several different organizations and take a representative of votes from across Indonesia to predict the winner. The problem this time around is the race is very close and of the 12 different quick counts done, 8 predicted one winner and the other 4 predicted the other candidate would win. So in the end they both declared victory leaving everyone very tense that there would be a confrontation between the two groups. Thankfully, things have been peaceful so far but we are all waiting to see the final results. Most likely those results will be challenged by the loser and it will have to resolved by the courts. This is uncharted water for Indonesia as they have never had this close of a race before. Please keep praying for peace, truth, and transparency.

Here are a few pictures from the election process. I accompanied some of my friends on election day to our local polling place.

My friend, Donda, receiving her ballot

Our local polling place

You can see the confusion in these quick count results!