Government Interference

A citizen in Pegu Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described a personal experience with USDP's abuse of advance votes and overheard stories of other violations.

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.

A citizen in Pegu Division reported: "In our village, people were issued USDP membership cards. Residents who have no ID were provided these for free. It was like an ID card application process. People had to fill forms and sign them. 10 out of 10 people in a family had to fill in the forms. There are 5 people in my family. I did not vote but 4 others voted. They did not need to use their fingerprints. I did not hear about advance voting. At least one person in a household had to apply for ID. Many people in our village had no interest in the election."

A citizen from Karen State spoke to Burma Election Tracker in an interview and stated: "There are many Mon and Karen ethnic residents in where I live, so I wanted to vote for those ethnic parties, but I could not vote freely for them. There were USDP members and WPDC authorities came to my house telling us and threatening us to vote for USDP. Many had to cast advance votes finally. Civilians are very angry with the military government and they reported abuses to corresponding opposition parties and parties said they would address the issues."

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)."

Residents said that some authorities had said they would stop the ongoing Rangoon-Pathain new railroad project at Pan Ta Naw Township, Irrawaddy Division because many voters in that area voted for National Unity Party (NUP) in the election.

ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း၊ ပန္းတေနာ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အတြင္းရွိ ေဖာက္လုပ္ဆဲ ရန္ကုန္-ပုသိမ္ ရထားလမ္းသစ္ စီမံကိန္းတစ္ေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ရြာမ်ား သည္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားစည္းလံုးညမီၫႊတ္ေရးပါတီ(တစည)၏ စပါးႏွံတံဆိပ္ကို မဲေပးမႈမ်ားခဲ့သျဖင့္ ၎ရထား လမ္းကို ဆက္လက္ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္သြားမည္ မဟုတ္ဟု အာဏာပိုင္အခ်ဳိ႕က ေျပာေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ဆိုသည္။

A military official shares his experiences: "Lion and Rice Branch (USDP and NUP) campaigned in my neighborhood before the elections. I was at home on the Election Day. I didn't vote for any party. Family members of military officials had to vote for USDP. That's why I didn't vote because it wouldn't make any difference. I'm not sure about the security because I live in a military compound. There were USDP and NUP members in the polling station. Military officers' family went to the polling station by car because of being a military families.

A citizen from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described how SPDC officials abused their authority to force advance votes for USDP.

"I did not vote myself. Following orders of senior chiefs, commanders serving in military battalions had to cast advance votes for USDP. Ward Peace and Development Council cast advance votes for family members for USDP."

A citizen in Rangoon Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker noted how authorities used a lack of voter education to push for USDP votes.