Wasti Atmodjo, Denpasar – A voting simulation held Sunday by the Denpasar General Elections Commission (KPUD) revealed a flaw that almost everyone – laymen and pundits alike – had already pointed out: the ballot is too large to enable a voter to process it quickly.

First-time voter Ni Made Adisti, 19, said the ballot was too big and featured too many political parties and candidates. "It contains too many choices," she said.

She admitted that processing the paper – opening, ticking on a party and candidate of choice, and folding it closed – took up far more time than she initially expected. Apart from this, she went on, she experienced no significant problems in completing the task.

"However, I can't even imagine how illiterate voters or the elderly would deal with this ballot. They're definitely going to have considerable problems in processing the paper," she said.

The KPUD's IGA Diah Yuniti said the commission had estimated each voter would need an average of four minutes to cast a vote. On the actual voting day, each voter will have to process four ballots.

"In the simulation, we saw many people take less than four minutes to process the ballot. However, there were a considerable number of voters who took longer than four minutes," she said.

The ballot's wieldy size is the inevitable result of the high number of political parties contesting the upcoming elections. In Bali alone, there are some 36 parties fielding almost 5,000 candidates.

Sunday's simulation was held at the community hall of Kertha Bhuwana hamlet in Denpasar.

"There are 325 registered voters in this hamlet. Denpasar has a total of 391,878 registered voters, and we will prepare 1,322 polling stations to accommodate them," said Denpasar KPUD head I Made Gede Ray Misno.

In the community hall, the local election committee had set up four voting booths, four ballot boxes and other election paraphernalia. Many registered voters came to the hall dressed in traditional Balinese dress, with several uniformed and plainclothes police officers monitoring the whole process.

"The simulation is aimed at compiling and identifying possible problems that we may face during the actual vote. That's why everything in the simulation is identical to that in the actual vote," Ray Misno said.