[DageDage]

Drowsy elderly man accidentally drinks election ink instead of coffee at voting station

A mayoral candidate losing to an empty box on the ballot in Makassar might not even be funniest story to come out of yesterday’s highly eventful nationwide regional elections in Indonesia. Arguably the most comical incident involved some election ink and a very unfortunate kakek (old man).

Mustafa, a 61-year-old man from Pontianak, West Borneo, claimed he didn’t get much sleep the night before yesterday’s election as he was among the civilian volunteers guarding the voting station in his neighborhood. By 11am on election day, Mustafa said he wanted to have some coffee because he was sleepy.

“I was sleepy, and I wanted to drink coffee. The cup of coffee was placed next to a container filled with election ink. Because I was feeling drowsy and I was facing the voters who had just come in, I picked up the election ink container. And I drank it. About a gulp of it,” Mustafa said, as quoted by Okezone.


Mustafa said he immediately realized the bitter liquid he swallowed wasn’t coffee.

“I spit out as much as I could. Always spitting out. Maybe hundreds of times. Every time I spit out, my saliva was blue,” he said.

Mustafa added that he has a cough now, possibly from drinking the ink, but that he doesn’t have any money to get himself checked out at the hospital.

The election ink is the official signifier that a voter had cast his/her vote in an election in Indonesia. Voters have to dip one or more of their fingers into the ink, leaving a purple/blue tint on the skin that comes off within a couple of days. The ink reportedly contains alcohol, silver nitrate and purple dye among other chemicals, which makes it sound quite ominous, but luckily Mustafa seems to be just fine.