Voter intimidation and threats in Karen state ေၾကာက္လို႔ ၾက့ံဖြတ္ကို မဲေပးခဲ့

A Karen citizen spoke of intimidation during the voting process to Burma Election Tracker: "I was at home but heard the election news by broadcast. I voted for USDP. The polling station was not a secure place while voting. I felt like I was closely watched all the time. I would not feel safe for my family if I did not vote for USDP. Many people were watching when I cast my vote. Some people were taking photos, but they looked like they were trying to stay unnoticed. There was some intimidation. Some USDP members were there also. Security officers were in civilian clothes. There was no violence though. There were a fairly high number of voters. My family cast their votes as well. They too voted for USDP as we did not want to put our family into trouble. There was some verbal campaigning inside the polling station while voting. My family was also frightened. Before we voted we were told to vote for USDP. We were told that we will be able to travel freely if we vote for USDP. This is an unjust election. Many people feel angry with USDP. They are intimidating people to get votes for themselves. " ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲက်င္းပျခင္းကုိ သတင္းကအစံုအလင္ ျကားမိပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္ အိမ္မွာပဲ ရိွေနပါတယ္။ ျကံ့ဖြံ့ပါတီကုိ မဲေပးခဲ့တယ္။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခ်ိန္တြင္ လံုျခံဳမွဳသိပ္မရိွပါဘူး။ သူတုိ့ေဘးမွာ ေစာင့္ျကည့္သလုိျကီးခံစားရတယ္။ ျကံ့ဖြံ့ကုိ မဲေပးခဲ့တယ္။ မေပးရင္ မိသားစုအတြက္စိတ္မခ်ရပါဘူး။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါ ေစာင့္ျကည့္တဲ့လူအမ်ားျကီးရိွပါတယ္။ ကင္မရာရုိက္တဲ့လူရိွပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ မထင္ေပၚေအာင္ေနတဲ့ပံုပဲ။ ျခိမ္းေျခာက္မွဳရိွပါတယ္။ မဲရံုမွာလည္း ျကံ့ဖြံ့အ၀င္ေတြ မသိမသာရိွေနပါတယ္။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါ ေျပာတာရိွပါတယ္။ လံုျခံဳေရးကေတာ့ အရပ္၀တ္ေတြနဲ့ရိွပါတယ္။ အျကမ္းဖက္မွဳက ဘာတခုမွ ေတြ့ရပါဘူး။ မဲရံုအနီး ရိွပါတယ္။ မဲေပးသူေတြက အသင့္တင့္ရိွပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္မိသားစုလည္း သြားေပးျကတယ္။ မိသားစုအတြက္ ျပသနာျဖစ္မွာစုိးလုိ့ ျက့ံဖြ့ံပါတီ မဲေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါ အမိန့္ဆန္ဆန္တုိက္တြန္းတာေတာ့ ရိွပါတယ္။ မိသားစုလည္း ျခိမ္းေျခာက္ခံရတယ္။ မဲေပးဖုိ့ အိမ္ကေျပာလာတာ ရိွပါတယ္။ ျက့ံခုိင္ေရးပါတီေပါ့...။ ျကံ့ခုိင္ေရးပါတီကုိ မဲေပးရင္ ခရီးသြားခြင့္ရႏုိင္တယ္လုိ့ သူတုိ့ေျပာတယ္။ ရြာဥကဌက အိမ္မွာ လာေရာက္မဲေတာင္းတာရိွပါတယ္။ ျကံ့ခုိင္ေရးပါတီေပါ့..။ က်ေနာ္ျကိုတင္မဲနဲ့ထည့္ခဲ့တယ္။ ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ မတရားေသာေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျဖစ္တယ္။ မဲထည့္သူေတြက ျက့ံခုိင္ေရးပါတီကုိ မေက်နပ္ျကပါဘူး။ ဒီပါတီဟာ ျခိမ္းေျခာက္မဲေတာင္းတဲ့ပါတီျဖစ္တယ္။ အားလံုးက မေက်နပ္ျကပါဘူး။ ဒီေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအေပၚ စိတ္မ၀င္းစားပါဘူး။