manipulation of election laws

A voter in Arakan State reported: "We employees were casting votes in the morning during office time. Because we had to cast vote in the presence of senior officers, we could not choose to vote the parties we like. We voted for the USDP as told by senior officers. Each employee were brought three envelopes with one ballot slip in each. On each slip, they had to tick on the boxes next to USDP logo. Envelopes with slips in them were then returned to TPDC chairperson without being sealed. Employees were threatened that they would be fired if did not vote for USDP."

A voter in Pegu Division explains his finding at a polling station as: "I voted for cone-shaped bamboo hat (NDF) all three times. There were three elderly people who voted before me. They did not know how to vote and polling station officials showed them where to tick and helped them tick on the slips by holding their hands. One elderly woman told the official that she wanted to vote for NUP but the official helped her tick on the lion (USDP). When I asked the three elderly women, they said that they had to tick next to the lion logo (USDP)."

A Pegu resident said: "On around October 15 in Begu, there was a group of 10 USDP members in uniforms campaigning. They had a poster of a lion and correct mark with a slogan “Vote for the lion party”. They also distributed hand-outs that had information of four candidates. WPDC came to my house and recorded household list and eligible voters list. I was traveling on the election so could not cast a vote and was fined 7,500 kyat. A polling station was located in school and the other one was near the market. Three people in my family voted. I think they will win anyway no matter we vote or not.

A voter from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I voted for another party rather than the USDP. There were so many rules and restrictions at the polling station which were not relevant to voting, such as: 'Cannot chew Bettle nut', 'No Hats', 'No shirts with long sleeves."

These types of rules could be used to refuse access to polling stations, thus limiting the number of voters.

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.

A resident said that although reporting to the polling station and the Election Commission about Daw Thin Thin Nwe, a member of USDP, who came in the polling station and taught the voters how to vote and tick the ballots as she liked at polling station no. 87 of Pharkant and Lonekhinn townships, there was no action taken.

Inside networks have reported to Burma Election Tracker that the head of the polling station and Election Commission didn't permit anyone to watch the vote counting and closed the door of the polling station at 4 pm in a township in Rangoon Division.

မဲရံုပိတ္ခ်ိန္(၄း၀၃)မွာ လိႈင္ၿမိဳ ႔နယ္ မဲရံု(၁)၊ (၁)ရပ္ကြက္၌ မဲရံုမႈးနွင့္ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔မွ မည္သူကိုမွ် မဲရံုအတြင္းအ၀င္မခံပဲ မဲရံုတခါးကို ပိတ္ထားလိုက္ပါတယ္လို႔ သြားေရာက္ခဲ့သူ တစ္ဦးကဆိုပါတယ္။

A voter in Arakan State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I'm disappointed because my name was not on the voting list and I couldn’t vote, although I reached the polling station."

မဲရံုသုိ ့ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ေသာ္လည္းမဲစာရင္းတြင္အမည္မပါရွိျခင္းေၾကာင့္မဲမေပးခဲ့သျဖင့္စိတ္ပ်က္မိပါသည္။

U Mar Kah, a NDF candidate, stated that he does not accept the result of the polling station No. 14 in Myitkyina Township, Kachin State, as USDP members were in that station and were directing 100 voters to vote for the USDP by pointing to the name of the USDP until voters finally ticked it.

Source: BBC