Authorities stage manage election in Pegu Division

A citizen in Pegu Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described the authorities tight control over a stage managed election process tilted in favor of USDP.

"I heard about the election. I returned home to vote and I did vote. My first slip was for USDP and the second one was blank. There were three boxes on the ballot slip given in polling station and when I asked how to vote a man told me to just tick on lion (USDP logo) and not to ask more, which made me sad. There were officers watching voters cast their votes. Voters were told not to speak while voting. There were [Ward Peace and Development Council] WPDC officers and USDP members in uniforms and there were about fourteen or fifteen of them serving as guards. They all told people to tick on the lion logo. People did not understand the procedure and everything went fine when they did as told. The polling station was set up at a primary school. There were about 20 people total in charge of the polling station. We were given ballot slips three times. There were no partitions inside polling station. There were eight people in our family, and only a couple could vote. People were forced to vote for lion party (USDP). Voters did not look motivated to vote. Villagers went to vote when told, and they did everything as said when they voted. Polling station opened at 6:00 am and closed at 4:00 pm. I did not hear anything about ballot counting. I don't know if the result will bring change, but right now prices are going up."

မဲေပးရမယ္လုိ့ ျကားပါတယ္။ မဲေပးဖုိ့ အိမ္ျပန္ခဲ့တယ္။ မဲလည္းေပးခဲ့တယ္။ ပထမတစ္ရြက္က ျခင္ေသၤ့ကုိ ေပးခဲ့တယ္။ ဒုတိယတစ္ရြက္က ကြက္လပ္ေနရာမွာ ျခစ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ဘာေျကာင့္လဲဆုိေတာ့ မဲရံုးထဲမွာ ထုတ္ေပးတဲ့ မဲျပားမွာ အကြက္သံုးကြက္ပါတယ္။ ဘယ္လုိလုပ္ရမလဲမွာလဲ တစ္ခုခ်င္းေမးၾကည့္တယ္။ လ်ာမရွည္နဲ႔ ျခင္ေသၤ့ေနရာမွာ ျခစ္လုိက္ပါ လူျကီးတစ္ေယာက္က ေျပာတယ္။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါမွာ ကုိယ့္မသိတဲ့ဟာကုိ ေမးေတာ့ ဒီလုိမ်ဳိးေျပာဆုိတာဟာ စိတ္မေကာင္းဘူးေပါ့။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါမွာလည္း ေစာင့္ျကည့္တဲ့လူေတြလည္း ရိွခဲ့တယ္။ မဲေပးတဲ့အခါမွာ စကားမေျပာရဘူးလုိ႔ ေျပာတယ္။ မဲရံုးအနီးတ၀ုိက္မွာ ေက်းရြာရယကအဖြဲ႔၀င္ေတြ၊ အက်ၤီအျဖဴ၊ ဦးထုပ္အစိမ္း၊ ျခေသၤ့တံဆိပ္ပါေဆာင္းထားတဲ့ လူငယ္လူျကီး (၁၄ - ၁၅)ေလာက္ရိွတယ္။ သူတုိ့ေတြက ျခေသၤ့တံဆိပ္ပါတဲ့အကြက္ကုိပဲ ထည့္ခုိင္းျကတယ္။ လံုျခံဳေရးကေတာ့ ရယကအဖြဲ႔ႏွင့္ ျကံ့ခုိင္ေရးေတြပဲ ရိွတယ္။ ဘာမွ နာမလည္တဲ့သူေတြဆုိေတာ့ သူတုိ့ခုိင္းတဲ့အတုိင္း လုပ္လုိက္ျကေတာ့ ေအးေဆးပါပဲ။ မဲရံုးက မူလတန္းေက်ာင္းမွာ ေထာင္တယ္။ မဲရံုးတာ၀န္က်တဲ့သူေတြက ၂၀ေလာက္ရိွတယ္။ မဲစာရြက္ကုိ သံုးခါထုတ္ရတယ္။ မဲျခစ္တဲ့ေနမွာ ဘာအကာအရံမွ ဘာမရိွပါဘူး။ က်မတုိ႔ မိသားစုမွာ ၈ ဦးရိွတယ္။ လက္မယား ၂ ဦးပဲ မဲေပးရတယ္။ ျခေသၤ့ကုိပဲ အတင္းအက်ပ္မဲထည့္ခုိင္းတယ္။ မဲရံုးမွာဆုိရင္ ျကံ့ခုိင္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ေတြပဲ ရိွတယ္။ ရြာမွာ မဲလာေပးတဲ့လူေတြက တတ္တတ္ျကြျကြ မရိွဘူး။ ရြားသူရြာသားေတြက ေခၚမွ သြားတယ္။ ခုိင္းတဲ့အတုိင္း ထည့္လုိက္တယ္ ဒီလုိမ်ဳိးပဲ ေက်နပ္ေနက်တယ္။ က်မတုိ႔ ရြာမွာ မဲရံုးကုိ ၆ နာရီဖြင့္တယ္။ ၄ နာရီပိတ္တယ္။ မဲေရတြက္ႏွင့္ပတ္ေသာတဲ့သတင္း ဘာမွာမျကားပါဘူး။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကေန အေျပာင္းအလဲက ျဖစ္လား မျဖစ္ဘူးလားဆုိတာ မသိဘူး။ ေလာေလာဆယ္မွာ ကုန္ေစ်းႏွဳန္းေတြ တတ္ေနက်တယ္။