Here’s What One Anti-Voting Activist Did on Indonesia's Election Day

Adhito Harinugroho has voted one way his entire life—not at all. It's a confusing statement to make, but it makes sense when you understand what not voting looks like in Indonesia. The practice, called golput, dates back to Indonesia's authoritarian New Order regime when people would show up at the polls, but choose no one on the ballot. It's an old idea that suddenly found a new life in the coverage of the 2019 presidential election—which just concluded with a quick count victory for incumbent Joko Widodo today.

Adhito, like everyone else in what's been described as a rising tide of non-voters in Indonesia, chose to golput this election because he didn't find much to like in either Jokowi or his rival Prabowo Subianto. Instead of choosing a lesser of two evils, Adhito showed up at the polls and marked everyone on the ballot—a practice he's done every election since 2004.

But this time he showed up at his local polling station, in Pondok Bambu, East Jakarta, with a shirt reading "Saya Golput," or "I'm not voting," and a mission to see if more people would join him in his cause.

As he walked up to the polling station, his neighbours immediately started to point and laugh. Some asked if he was for real. Adhito ignored them and walked over to a group of voters closer to his age, striking up a conversation about the election.

“There doesn’t seem to be an ideal choice in this election,” one of them said. “But I’m still going to vote. It's our only choice."

“Of course there’s no ideal choice,” Adhito replied. “But we also have the choice not to vote.”

As he waited for his name to be called to the voting booth, Adhito drank his coffee, smoked a cigarette and made small talk with his neighbours. “Election day is sort of a reunion for me," Adhito told me. “I get to chat with the friends and neighbours I rarely see because we're all busy with work.”

Idle chit-chat aside, the main reason why Adhito was so adamant about going to the polling station was that he wanted to spark discussion. He made sure to bring hundreds of "Saya Golput" stickers, which he planned to plaster around the area.

A short time later, his name was called through the loudspeaker. Again, the crowd stared him down. Adhito casually walked to the voting booth, came out, and placed each ballot in its designated box. He dipped his finger into the bottle of blue ink, to signify that he “voted.”

“I put a sticker on the voting booth,” Adhito told me with laugh.

The number of people who choose golput is growing, reports say, and they might become a political force to be reckoned with. Days before election day, reports showed that Indonesian's choosing golput could make up of an estimated 30 percent of millennial and Gen-Z eligible voters. Most of them are disappointed with Jokowi's performance in the last five years, including his lack of commitment to combat issues such as human rights violations and the aggressive use of the vague ITE Law to suppress freedom of speech.

As one political expert Yohanes Sulaiman told VICE a day before election day, "We wanted him to be this human rights warrior, but the problem is he’s not."

Ahead of the election day, young voters also took to social media to point out both presidential candidates' involvement in Indonesia's environmentally-damaging coal industry, a conversation spurred by showings of the documentary Sexy Killers, which had been watched over 12 million times on YouTube by election day.

It's unknown how many people chose golput in Wednesday's election. The unofficial quick counts which show voters who won the election don't release figures about marred or invalid ballots. We know that voter turnout, on a whole, was up slightly from the 2014 presidential election, but no one will know what percentage of those ballots were golput until the official figures get released by the General Elections Commision (KPU).

But still, it almost doesn't matter for Alghifari Aqsa, a lawyer involved in the increasingly popular "Saya Golput" campaign. He told VICE that golput was only a start and that he was ready to mobilise people take a concrete action after election day.

“We will announce our political agendas by then," he told VICE. "We treat election day as merely the beginning of our bigger political movement."

Adhito told me that he will remain a non-voter for as long as politics remains a game for Indonesia's elites—a sign of what he sees as the country's failure at adopting a democratic system.

“Golput is a long-term endeavour,” he said. “I’m not sure 2024 election will be any different. Golput will continue to be an opposition [to the existing system], no matter who wins.”

This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia.