Government Interference

A voter from Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I wanted to vote for the Mon party but USDP members were pushing me at home and my local shop very often. We voted for them. When I said I would vote for the Mon party, USDP members came to my house at 7 pm and told me that I would lose my livelihood if I did that and if I voted for them I would have more opportunity and permission to extend my business. They also said I would be in trouble if I voted for Mon party. My husband told me to just vote for the USDP.

A voter from Rangoon Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I got the news that I had to cast a vote. I called my home and I was told that the Ward Peace and Development Council was conducting a family household survey. I returned home but did not vote. When they came to my house to survey the household members, I said I would not cast a vote, but they told me I had to vote. They got my name. It was USDP members who collected the household number. I am not interested in this election. I did not cast a vote. I went to polling station just to observe.

On election day, there were elderly people who needed assistance in casting their vote and those in charge of the polling station ticked the ballot slips for them and put them in the ballot boxes.

These kinds of violations have been pervasive in Burma's election, just as in the 2008 referendum.

ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြေန႔တြင္ အသက္ႀကီးရြယ္အုိမ်ား မဲမထည့္တတ္သည္ကို မဲရံုတာ၀န္ရွိပုဂိၢဳလ္မ်ားက ကိုယ္တုိင္ျခစ္ေပးၿပီး မဲဗံုးထဲသုိ႔ ထည့္ခဲ့သည္။

Source: Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)

A voter from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I voted for another party rather than the USDP. There were so many rules and restrictions at the polling station which were not relevant to voting, such as: 'Cannot chew Bettle nut', 'No Hats', 'No shirts with long sleeves."

These types of rules could be used to refuse access to polling stations, thus limiting the number of voters.

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.

A Mon state citizen was interviewed by Burma Election Tracker and described voter intimidation and a lack of confidence in the election:

Burma Election Tracker conducted the following interview with a Citizen from Rangoon division after the election, where a number of election issues such as fraud, access to polling stations and miscounting of votes were raised:

There have been widespread reports of goverment employees being forced to vote for the USDP. A citizen in Pegu division told Burma Election Tracker: "I voted for USDP as our dignitary asked me and because I'm public service personnel." | ၀န္ထမ္းျဖစ္ေနသျဖင့္လူၾကီးမ်ားေပးခိုင္းသည့္အတုိင္းၾကံ့ခိုင္ေရး(USDP)အားေပးခဲရပါသည္။

A voter from the Irrawaddy Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I voted for the USDP because I'm a teacher [government employee]. Even though I voted for the USDP, I don't think anything will change in our country."

Many government employees have felt forced and pressured to vote for the USDP in Burma's election.

ေက်ာင္းဆရာမတေယာက္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ဒါေၾကာင့္ၾကံ့ခိုင္ေရး၊(USDP)ကုိဘဲထည့္လိုက္ရပါတယ္။သူ ့ကုိထည့္လိုက္ေပမယ့္တုိင္းျပည္ေျပာင္းလာလာမယ္လို ့မထင္ပါဘူး။

A voter from Arakan State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said:"I'm a member of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) and voted for my party. There were many biases in the election campaign. There was a prohibition to campaign in religious buildings such as: monasteries and chapels, but we could campaign in ward-chapels located away from monasteries. Campaigners were not allowed to use loudspeaker and only allowed to use a sound box, but the USDP could get around all prohibitions.