By far the most distressing news to come out of last Wednesday’s election in Indonesia were reports of election officials — most of them volunteers — dying on or shortly after the day of the vote, many of them reportedly due to exhaustion. More troubling reports have now emerged alleging that multiple female election volunteers had to have their pregnancies terminated and, in one case, lost a baby due to exhaustion from working on April 17.
Dewi Lutfiatun Nadhifah, 30, volunteered to be a voting station monitor in her village in Jember Regency, West Java. Dewi was five months pregnant with what would be her second child, but, on election day, after she worked from 6am to 1:30am on the next day, she began showing signs of miscarriage.
“At the time, I kept bleeding, and I had myself checked out at a clinic. And that’s when I found out that I had a miscarriage,” Dewi told Kompas yesterday.
Dewi said she was eager to volunteer and be part of Indonesia’s historic election day.
“After a while, I eventually learned to accept [what happened]. I accept it for the future of the nation. I accept that my fetus [was taken],” she said.
Another pregnant woman who volunteered on election day was 26-year-old Andriana from East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. Like Dewi, Andriana was five months pregnant and she also worked late into the night guarding her voting station, even though she noticed blood spotting after her volunteer training on April 10.
When she got home after the election, she said fresh blood was coming out of her vagina and she was rushed to a nearby hospital. She was forced to give birth prematurely and she says her baby has very little chance at survival.
“She still has a heartbeat. But the doctor said her chance of survival is only one percent. In the next two days they predicted that she will leave me forever,” she told Kompas.
Sunarni, a 22-year-old woman from Dompu Regency, West Nusa Tenggara, reportedly fell ill after volunteering on April 17, which, officials say, led to the loss of her child.
“She fell ill from exhaustion so she wasn’t able to breastfeed her five-month old baby. Because of the lack of breastfeeding, the baby died. Now Ibu Sunarni is still under medical care for her illness and her immense sadness from losing a child,” Zuriati, a member of the West Nusa Tenggara chapter of the General Election Commission (KPU), told Kompas.
As of Tuesday evening, KPU’s data showed that 119 election officials have died while 548 others fell ill across 25 provinces after the election. KPU has not commented on how many of those deaths were attributable to exhaustion, only that the committee is working to ensure that their families receive the government compensation they’re entitled to.
That said, considering that there were 7.2 million election workers on April 17, questions have been raised as to whether there’s a correlation between the number of officials who died and their working on the election, as pointed out by The Associated Press’ Stephen Wright:
it’s possibly a misconception they died due to the election. there were 7.2 million election workers and based on regular mortality rates in Indonesia, roughly 45,500 of those people would die in a year or about 125 a day on average.
— Stephen Wright (@stephenwrightAP) April 23, 2019
Similarly, without more demographic and medical data it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about whether the miscarriages and infant death being reported on can be attributed to the election and its implementation by KPU officials.
Nonetheless, these tragic cases should give the election commission reason to reconsider how elections are implemented from now on. KPU officials have already said they are considering separating out national and regional legislative elections in the future in order to decrease the burden on volunteers.
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