intimidation and threats

The Union of Myanmar Federation of National Politics (UMFNP) party members were intimidated during party work in Poung Kyo village in Shwe Taung Township, western Bago region on 26 August.

UMFNP’s group led by U Kyaw Kyaw Lwin were intimidated by members of the Swan Arr Shin group when they were issuing party membership cards to members, U Aye Lwin, chairman of UMFNP party, said.

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 voter in Arakan State reported: "We employees were casting votes in the morning during office time. Because we had to cast vote in the presence of senior officers, we could not choose to vote the parties we like. We voted for the USDP as told by senior officers. Each employee were brought three envelopes with one ballot slip in each. On each slip, they had to tick on the boxes next to USDP logo. Envelopes with slips in them were then returned to TPDC chairperson without being sealed. Employees were threatened that they would be fired if did not vote for USDP."

A citizen in Mon State reported: "the entire village assembled and every villager was compelled to vote. There were fairly high number of voters. Police and soldiers involved in directing villagers to vote and everyone participated in voting and voted for lion party (USDP) as they were afraid. I don't think civilians like the election. I don't like it either. I don't expect anything out of the election."

Advance votes were collected from elderly people following the order of WPDC and authorities cast the vote for USDP. Locals were told that they would be deadly punished if they didn't vote for the USDP. While collecting advance votes, elderly people were pressured by the force of officers to vote for USDP. When complaints about such cases were submitted to Election Commission, the WPDC threatened people that they would kill people who would file such complaints again.

Retired colonel Kyaw Khin, a USDP Township parliamentary candidate, offered monetary inducement to the head of polling station in charge to ensure that he would win the votes. He offered a thousand kyat to each of the teachers who were working as polling station officials. Kyaw Khin also collected about 400 advance votes from Muslim fishermen. He threatened villagers, stating that they would be in big trouble if they did not vote for him.

A citizen from Mon state reported: "Households from ward No 1 and 2 from of our village that did not vote were all fined 10,000 kyat each. In addition, village head went to those houses, rebuked household members and got their votes in favor of USDP."

က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ရြာမွာ ရပ္ကြက္ (၁) နွင့္ (၂)တုိ့ကုိ မဲသြားမေပးခဲ့တဲ့ အိမ္ေပါင္း ၁၅ အိမ္ကုိ ဒဏ္ေငြ ၁၀၀၀၀ ေဆာင္ခဲ့ရတယ္။ မဲေတြကုိလည္း ရြာဥကဌကုိယ္တုိင္းအိမ္လာျပီး မဲစာရြက္ေတြေပးျပီး ျခေသၤ့ရုပ္အကြက္ထဲမွာ အမွန္ျခစ္တယ္။ အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးဆဲတယ္။

A voter in Pegu Division said: "I did hear about election. I saw a brochure on my fence. There were lion logo and rice branch logo on them. I returned home and voted. Not that I felt glad but like duty that I had to complete. There were more USDP members persuading voters. They were telling people to vote for them. Guards included firefighters and other officers. Polling station was at the primary school. There were a fair number of voters. There of my family member voted. My grandpa voted for the rice branch (NUP). There are no positive outcomes from voting for the lion (USDP).

A villager in Mon State said: "Advance votes were being collected house by house especially from elderly people. Some villagers refused to cast advance votes and they were threatened. It was USDP - in groups of 5-6 people - collecting advance votes."

“တစ္ရြာလံုးမွာ အသက္ ၆၀ အထက္ အသက္ျကီးရြယ္အုိသူမ်ားကုိ အဓိကထားျပီၚ တစ္အိမ္းတက္တစ္အိမ္ဆင္း ျကိုတင္မဲမ်ား ေကာက္ယူခဲ့တယ္။ အခ်ဳိ႔ရြာသူရြာသားမ်ားက ျကုိတင္မဲေပးဖုိ႔အတြက္ ျငင္းပယ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ျခိမ္းေျခာက္ခံရတယ္။ ျကုိတင္မဲေတြ ေကာက္ယူတဲ့အဖြဲ႔ ကေတာ့ USDP ျဖစ္ေျကာင္းႏွင့္ တစ္အုပ္စုလွ်င္ ၅ - ၆ ဦး ရိွပါတယ္။” မြန္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ရြာသားတစ္ဦးမွေျပာသည္။

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."