Indonesia election 2024: will young voters be key in picking the right man on Valentine’s Day?

The organisation of the world’s largest single-day election is no easy feat given the challenge of reaching out to voters living across Indonesia’s vast archipelago comprising over 17,000 islands.

To make this single-day vote possible, election commission officials, alongside armed guards, are travelling far and wide using boats, planes and even helicopters, to transport ballot boxes and papers across the country, including to remote outlying islands.

In Sumatra’s Aceh province, organisers were still debating using elephants to carry ballot boxes over tough terrains, according to an Agence France-Presse report. And in Lampung province, election officials have cows on standby to drag ballot boxes through mud tracks to and from polling stations.

Horses will be tasked with bringing ballots to a remote village in the southeast corner of Java island in case of bad weather, the report added.

Weather also presents a tricky challenge, with the risks of heavy rain and flooding a cause for concern. In Central Java, election officials on Monday said they were pondering postponing voting in Karanganyar district due to heavy flooding in the area.

To encourage higher voter turnout, the government has designated February 14th as a public holiday in Indonesia.

Although voting is not mandatory, the country typically witnesses significant public participation on election day, with previous elections recording a turnout of over 70 per cent.

This year, 52 per cent of registered voters are under 40 and almost one-third of all voters are under 30, so securing the vote of the youth bloc has been a strong focus for all the candidates.

With election day falling on the same date as Valentine’s Day, many young people are using the coincidence to encourage