manipulation of the voters list

A citizen in Pegu Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described a personal experience with USDP's abuse of advance votes and overheard stories of other violations.

According to inside networks, there were about 1,700 eligible voters in Pouk Taw Township constituency 5, Arakan State, but only about 600 of them voted. Most of them boycotted the election. Although there was not advance voting, there were about 40 advance votes when votes are counted. There were many people in Kyoung Sout village who could not vote, as they were not in voters list. The village head of A’ Lal Kyun ran away with ballot boxes, as so many people voted for RNDP instead of USDP.

A citizen in Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker claimed that authorities used misinformation and fraudulent advance votes for the USDP to manipulate the election outcome.

"The village head informed everyone in our village that people over 60 years old were not allowed to vote. There are over 3,000 people over 60 in my village. One of the Election Commission members said that all of the votes of these elderly people were counted for USDP as advance votes. This election was clearly held for USDP."

A resident from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I heard about the elections. I also heard that people were supposed to vote for the USDP. I went home. I couldn't vote because my name was not on the household member list. My family members voted. I don't know which party they voted for. We were provided with voting cards and voting was mandatory. There were no threats and no persuasion door to door. Not many people voted. Some people voted because they were provided voting cards. In the late afternoon of the election day, the situation went bad.

On November 2, lists of USDP voters were made in Tapathon, Naipyai, Kaukhapon, Kwayone, Kamawet, Kalauthau, Doma and Kumhlar villages in Mudon township, Mon State. A USDP member stated that USDP already collected lists of probably half of total eligible voters in the area.

ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ မုဒုံျမဳိ႕နယ္ရွိ တာပသြန္ေက်းရြာ၊ ႏိုင္ျပဳိင္ေက်းရြာ၊ ေကာ့ခပုံ၊ ေကြ႔ဝမ္း၊ ကမာ ဝက္၊ ကေလာ့ ေသာ့၊ ဒိုးမားႏွင့္ ကြမ္လွာေက်းရြာမ်ားတြင္ ေကာက္ယူခဲ့ျပီး မဲေပးႏိုင္သူဦးေရ၏ ထက္ဝက္ေက်ာ္ကို ေကာက္ခံရရွိ ထားေၾကာင္း ပါတီဝင္တစ္ဦးကေျပာသည္။

Source: IMNA

Gen. Ohn Myint, who was contesting in Mudon Township, Mon State representing USDP for the State Parliament, ordered on November 2 to make lists of voters who were voting for the USDP.

ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ မြန္ျပည္နယ္ မုဒံုျမဳိ႔နယ္ ျပည္နယ္လႊတ္ေတာ္ (၁) တြင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ျပဳိင္မည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုႀကံ့ခုိင္ေရးႏွင့္ဖံြ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးပါတီ USDP မွ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္အုန္းျမင့္က ၄င္းတို႔ပါတီအား မဲထည့္ေပး မည့္ သူမ်ား၏စာရင္းကို ေကာက္ယူရန္ ညြန္ၾကားထားသည္။

Source: IMNA

A voter from Sagaing Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "They intentionally left out our whole family from the voting list."

"က်ေနာ္တို ့တအိပ္လံုးအားမဲေပးခြင့္ခ်န္လွပ္ထားခဲ့ျပီးမဲေပးခြင့္မရေအာင္တမင္လုပ္သြားခဲ့ပါသည္။
"

A voter explained to Burma Election Tracker how they were not able to vote during the election: "When I went to vote I was not on the voter list. I felt upset about this. I didn't go and talk to the head of village however, because I was not interested that much in the election." | မဲစာရင္းမပါလို ့မဲမေပးသျဖင့္စိတ္ထဲတြင္ကသိကေအာင့္ျဖစ္ရပါသည္။ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအားစိတ္၀င္စားမႈသိပ္မရွိေသာေၾကာင့္ရြာလူၾကီးလည္းသြားမေျပာေတာ့ပါ။

A voter from Arakan State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said:"I'm a member of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) and voted for my party. There were many biases in the election campaign. There was a prohibition to campaign in religious buildings such as: monasteries and chapels, but we could campaign in ward-chapels located away from monasteries. Campaigners were not allowed to use loudspeaker and only allowed to use a sound box, but the USDP could get around all prohibitions.