TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A researcher at the pollster LSI Denny JA, Ikrama Masloman, predicted the number of abstainer or golput would likely increase in the 2019 presidential election. The estimation resulted from the latest LSI’s survey.

The survey that was conducted about a month before the election showed that only 65.2 percent of Indonesian people acknowledged that the election would take place in April 2019.

Ikrama said that public lack of information concerning the election day highly affected the prevalence of abstainer.

Referred to the survey, as many as 75.8 percents of eligible voters correctly answered that the election day falls on April 17, 2019.

Read: LBH Jakarta Predicts Rise of Golput in 2019 Election

“That means, there is only 49.4 percent of Indonesian who are exposed to the information,” said Ikrama today, March 19, at his office on Jalan Pemuda, East Jakarta.

The General Election Commission (KPU) recorded that for the past three elections, the prevalence of golput varied around 23 to 30 percent. In 2014, there were 23.3 percent abstainers, and that gradually increased to 27.45 percent and 30.42 percent in 2009 and 2014 respectively.

“So we predict the number of abstainers will rise in 2019 due to public lack of information,” he added.

Additionally, Ikrama forecasted that the rising sentiment on identity politics and hoax would add to the number of non-voters in the upcoming election. “Voters are bored of the existing polarization so the tendency of abstentions would possibly higher,” he said.

LSI Denny JA runs the survey across Indonesian provinces from February 18 to 25, 2019, by implementing the face-to-face interview with the questionnaire and multistage random sampling toward 1,200 respondents. The margin of error of the poll was around 2.9 percent.

DEWI NURITA