TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Home Affairs Minister Tito Karnavian hoped the 2020 regional head elections or Pilkada could be a medium to help suppress the transmission of COVID-19.

“Other than running democratically without acts of anarchy, Pilkada can be safe from COVID-19 and even can curb COVID-19,” said Tito in a coordination meeting with the General Election Committee (KPU) and Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) on Friday, September 4, 2020.

Tito said he had proposed several strategies to set up the simultaneous elections as a means to control the community in handling COVID-19.

The request has been approved by the KPU and ratified in the KPU Regulation No. 10 of 2020. In Article 60, campaign teams are allowed to provide campaign materials in the form of personal protective equipment or PPE, such as face masks, hand gloves, face shields, and antiseptics or hand sanitizers.

Stickers of candidate pairs’ names or photos could also be put on those items, the minister added.

With the policy, Tito said, all campaign teams of candidate pairs would automatically carry out a door to door campaign, promoting their candidates’ popularity and electability while helping raise public awareness of COVID-19 and health protocols.

“This is a great potential. Imagine if there are 540 candidate pairs from 270 regions, and each of them distributes 100,000 face masks, then there will be 54 million masks given to the public. That is amazing,” Tito Karnavian said.

Read: Home Affairs Minister Calls on Officials to Promote COVID-19 Health Protocols

FRISKI RIANA