Muninggar Sri Saraswati – This year's legislative elections saw the biggest number of non-voters in a decade, with some pollsters predicting up to 40 percent failed to show up for the country's third general elections since the fall of former President Suharto.

Quick counts conducted by the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education and Information, or LP3ES, indicated that the number of eligible voters who did not exercise their rights in Thursday's legislative elections may reach 34 percent.

"This is the highest figure [of non-voters] since the 1999 elections," Sudar D. Atmanto, who is the deputy director of LP3ES, said on Friday.

In the 1999 elections, the first after Suharto's iron-fisted regime fell apart, 20 percent of the total eligible voters stayed away from the polls, while in 2004 about 26 percent abstained. The General Elections Commission, or KPU, listed more than 171 million eligible voters for this year's legislative elections. The 34 percent estimate does not including unregistered voters.

LP3ES estimated that if the number of non-voters was combined with the number of unregistered voters, the total would be around 40 percent. The KPU has received widespread criticism for its failure to include many people with voting rights on its final voters list, leaving thousands of people out of this year's legislative elections.

Another pollster, the Strategic Center for Development and Policy Review, or Puskaptis, also estimated around 40 percent of eligible voters did not participate in Thursday's elections. The Indonesian Survey Institute, or LSI, put the figure at about 35 percent.

Sudar said the KPU should be held responsible for the high number of non-voters this year, citing a failure to disseminate adequate information about the elections and problems involving the final list of voters. "Certainly, the government and KPU must review the final list of voters for the presidential election," he said.

Burhanuddin Muhtadi, a researcher from LSI, added that Indonesian voters have been suffering from "elections fatigue" due to races on the local level that have been conducted continuously since 2005. "Too many local elections have played a part in the decreasing participation in Thursday's elections," he said.

Burhanuddin said voters were also skeptical about the performance of the legislators who would sit in the House of Representatives this year. "The available choices are equally terrible," he said.

Burhanuddin also said that some people chose not to vote because they wanted to take advantage of the extended holiday weekend from Thursday to Sunday.

Meanwhile, KPU chairman Abdul Hafiz Anshyary said the commission had done its best to organize the elections, but he expressed regret that people with the right to vote had been left off the final voters list. "We apologize if they could not vote, though we had made announcements about the final voters list several times," he said.