71 Indonesian election officials died on duty from exhaustion following last Wednesday’s elections while more than 4,500 fell ill. Health Minister Budi Sadikin said other than exhaustion the second highest cause of death was heart failure.

Apparently nearly 400,000 people out of 6.8 million officials across the country were approved to work on the election despite having health concerns. Officials have been working 10-15 hour days to verify ballot papers, tabulate the results, submit and verify the submitted results to the central database, which has problems of its own.

So far, with 71% of the ballots officially counted, data from more than 1,200 polling stations were found to be erroneous out of more than 820,000 stations, which triggers a revote in a number of locations.

In 2019 nearly 900 election officials died on the job from exhaustion while more than 5,000 fell ill.

Apparently a lot of Indonesians have never heard of voting by mail, thinking people can only vote on the day of the election instead of sending their ballot papers by mail.

There’s no mail-in ballots in the country but extensively used overseas where polling stations are limited to consular offices and embassies.

Worldwide exit polls for this month’s Indonesian presidential election have been released in defiance of the election rules which prohibit them from being announced until polling booths are closed in Western Indonesia on Wednesday.

Surprisingly all of the results gave a win to Ganjar and Mahfud MD, the least popular pairing across all domestic surveys, and by large margins.

In some cases the exit polls were conducted ahead of the actual voting day which differ from country to country, presumably based on those who cast mail-in ballots.

However, by no means it’s an indicator for the final results. Prabowo-Gibran are expected to sweep the election on Wednesday and they’ve been polling increasingly better by the week, exceeding 50% in some cases, which would negate the need for a second round in June.

By the way, overseas votes are counted as part of the South and Central Jakarta constituency, so they don’t matter as much in the national level.