Police in Irrawaddy division ordered to submit advance votes directly to their superiors (ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္းရွိ ရဲမ်ားအား ၾကိဳတင္မဲမ်ားကို မိမိတို႕ အထက္အရာရွိမ်ားထံတင္သြင္းရန္ အမိန္႕ေပး)

Pressure to support USDP further fouls vote integrity
Saturday, 06 November 2010 20:00 Mizzima News

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – In perhaps one of the final blows to the credibility of Burma’s highly criticised general election, reports have emerged of residents being forced to vote for junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party candidates in voting undertaken in advance of tomorrow’s poll.

The damning allegations include vote-tampering, the use of threats and intimidation and the collusion of USDP candidates, ward election authorities, local police, military commanders and Border Guard Forces to coerce voters to support the junta-backed party.

Democratic Party (Myanmar) candidate Thu Wei told Mizzima threats and intimidation had been widespread in his electorate.

“Soldiers and police also had to cast their absentee votes. Some of them are relatives of mine and some of them friends,” Thu Wei said. “They told me how they had to cast their votes in advance. A police major ordered all officers to cast their absentee votes in his presence, and an army commander ordered the same of his subordinates.”

Police in Bogale Township, Irrawaddy Division, have been ordered to submit advance votes to their superior officers, Peace and Diversity Party candidate Sandar Oo said. “They cast the votes but not by secret ballot. They had to hand their ballots to their superior officers.”

She said advance voting should only be for people who were unable to visit polling stations on election day, but in her constituency, everyone was allowed to vote in advance. She added that she would register a complaint with the township branch of the Union Election Commission.

http://www.mizzima.com/news/election-2010/4543-pressure-to-support-usdp-...

ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း၊ ဘုိကေလးျမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ ရဲမ်ားအား ၾကိဳတင္မဲမ်ားကို ၎တို႕၏အထက္အရာရွိမ်ားထံ တင္သြင္းရန္ အမိန္႕ေပးေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ မတူညီကြဲျပားမႈမ်ားပါတီ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္း ေဒၚစႏၵဦးမွ ေျပာၾကားသည္။