If you’ve been to any of Jakarta’s major malls lately, you’ve probably seen Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok) booths, where Jakartans can submit their voter IDs to enable incumbent Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama to run as an independent candidate in the 2017 elections.
But as strange as it might sound, not everyone in Jakarta actually likes to go to the malls. For that reason, the Indonesia Solidarity Party (PSI), which is headed by former TV One anchor Grace Natalie and mainly consists of young members, is taking the proactive step to pick up people’s voter IDs from their homes to help Teman Ahok.
Taking a page out of ojek motorcycle taxi hailing app Go-Jek’s playbook, the political party created an app called GoAhokPSI that allows people to have their voter IDs delivered to Teman Ahok using motorcycle couriers.
“Right now we have 100 motorcycles. Just download the app on [Google] Playstore and wherever you are in the administrative region of the capital, [the courier] will pick up [the voter ID]. It’s free seven days a week,” said Grace Natalie, as quoted today in a press release from Teman Ahok.
At the time of writing, Teman Ahok has collected over 370,000 voter IDs since the beginning of March, which is way more than their initial projected expectation. They need a minimum of 532,000 voter IDs by the end of July for Ahok to qualify to run as an independent, but they are expected to comfortably pass that and possibly even reach 1 million IDs by July.
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