Kachin

A citizen in Kachin State told Burma Election Tracker, "I don't vote because I'm not interested and nothing will change after the election."

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျပီးရင္လဲဘာမွထူးျခားလာမွာမဟုတ္သလိုစိတ္၀င္စားမႈလဲမရွိသျဖင့္မဲမေပးပါ။

A resident said that people had to vote with no security because the voting booth was not covered in the polling station of the Pannwar governed by U Sakhont Tainyein, whose troops transformed into Border Guard Forces.

"There was the chairman of the quarter SPDC in front of the polling station watching and telling the voters that 'You must vote for U Sakhont Tainyein [USDP candidate] and we know who you voted for so watch out!' Therefore people had to vote for him," he added.

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.

Lawyer U Myint Thwin who was documenting information about the election in Kachin state said that he noted the following problems: there was the signature of the head of the polling station in the advanced votes, there wasn't the logo of the chairman of the commission, the USDP ballot boxes were not sealed--there were only seals on the NDF boxes.

A resident of Kachin State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "There will be no change. Although we participate for the good, we already know the SPDC is evil. I did not vote because the SPDC is doing what they want to."

ဘာမွထူးျခားလာမွာမဟုတ္သလို၊မိမိတို ့ကေကာင္းမယ္ထင္ျပီးလုပ္လဲSPDCမွယုတ္မာမယ္ဆုိတာၾကိဳုုသိေနလို ့ပါ။SPDC ဟာလုပ္ခ်င္တုိင္းလုပ္ေနတာျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္မဲသြားမေပးပါ။

A resident of Kachin State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "We didn't vote. In our region, we don't like the USDP. Most of the people voted for the ethnic parties and they won after the votes were counted in the evening. But the next morning we heard that the UDP had won. There was security outside and in the polling station and it was known that there was no free voting. In our house, there were 6 eligible voters but they came and gave us only 3 voting cards. So our house could only cast 3 votes. We feel that they bully the ethnic people."

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

The National Democratic Force (NDF), led by former members of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), has been banned from election campaigning in some parts of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, northern Burma, said sources close to party.

The NDF’s campaign in Tatkone and Shatapru, the two main quarters of the capital, was prohibited yesterday by the ruling Burmese junta’s Kachin State Administrative Office of the so-called Kachin State Peace and Development Council, the sources said.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which is backed by Burma’s military, is campaigning in ethnic Kachin churches, using small donations to gain votes on November 7th, according to Kachin church sources.

On October 11, the USDP candidate, U Thein Zaw, campaigned at the Kachin Roman Catholic Church in Gat Shang Yang Village, 18 miles south of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State. Church sources said he made a donation 3 million kyat (est. US$3,109) to the church.

An interesting contest is in the offing in Myitkyina, Kachin State where U Mar Khar, a NDF nominee will take on the Post and Telecommunication Minister Thein Zaw, a USDP candidate, U Aung War, a Kachin State analyst, said.

The NDF opened its party office in Yuzana ward, Myitkyina on 9 October. Two Kachin nominees of the NDF will contest from Pharkant and Myitkyina Townships. Daw Jar Bauk will contest from Pharkant Township.