Ahmad Pathoni, Jakarta – Most people in Indonesia's tsunami-hit Aceh province want to vote in December's landmark elections but many wrongly believe they are not registered to do so, a survey released on Wednesday showed.

The ballot, the first ever direct vote for top posts in the province, is another milestone in efforts to permanently end a conflict that has killed 15,000 people since the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) launched a rebellion against Jakarta in 1976.

Fifty-six percent of 1,233 Acehnese questioned said they were very likely to vote in the Dec. 11 elections, with 33 percent saying they were somewhat likely to vote, a survey by IFES, an international group promoting democracy, showed.

But 68 percent said they did not have very much information about the election while 11 percent said they had no information.

Only 30 percent said they were registered to vote, while 68 percent believed they were not registered and two percent said they did not know.

The results suggested the election registration drive had used names supplied by village heads, and other residency lists, leaving individual voters unaware of their status, IFES said in a statement.

Rakesh Sharma, IFES research manager, said election officials would need to do more to inform voters about their registration. "Perception of registration status is important to determine how prepared people feel for the election," he said in the statement.

Separately at a news conference, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) said an independent audit showed 86.9 percent of an estimated 2.5 million eligible voters in Aceh were registered even though only two thirds of them were aware of that fact.

The chief of the NDI's operations in Indonesia, Paul Rowland, called the registration drive successful, given the fact many Acehnese had been displaced by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the insurgency.

"There's no country in the world with 100 percent voters' registration. In a place where many people are displaced, this is a good result," he said.

A former general and a former separatist rebel are among eight candidates running for Aceh governor.

GAM and the Indonesian government signed a truce in August 2005 under Finnish mediation that paved the way for involvement of former rebels in local Aceh politics after they agreed to end their armed struggle for an independent state.

The Helsinki agreement came about after months of talks spurred by the tsunami that left around 170,000 Acehnese dead or missing.