Jakarta – As Indonesians worried about possible fraud and manipulation in Monday's historic election, more than 500 international monitors moved into action Friday to make sure voting takes place fairly.

Former US President Jimmy Carter will join the observer mission on Saturday, part of a mammoth effort to ensure the sprawling archipelago's freest elections since 1955 are not tainted.

European Union election monitor Barbara Smith has spent the last three weeks visiting dozens of local offices in North and West Jakarta, inspecting poll conditions for 1.3 million voters. She checks that ballots are in order and will be carefully protected.

In the Penjanngan district, a dozen closely guarded workers faced a midnight deadline as they made last-minute preparations and waited for tallying forms. Six carpenters frantically repaired broken boxes.

International observers will join more than 617,000 local monitors, blanketing almost every polling station in the sprawling country of 210 million people.

Smita Notosusanto, a political science professor and executive director of domestic monitoring group UNFREL, said people only will trust an outcome certified by Indonesian monitors. Ninety-five percent of her group's members are students.

"You have to put yourself in the context of a country that has never learned to conduct a free election," she said. "The domestic observers have a crucial, unprecedented role. We should make the first evaulation, not the foreign monitors. You tell that to Mr. Jimmy Carter."

Carter plans to announce the US monitors' preliminary assessment of the election two days after the polls close.

Because Indonesia is spread out over so many islands, the logistics of distributing and counting votes is daunting.

"This will probably amount to the largest deployment of domestic monitors for an election that we've ever seen in the world," said Charles Costello, director of democracy programs at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.