abuse of advance votes

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.

According to inside networks, there were about 1,700 eligible voters in Pouk Taw Township constituency 5, Arakan State, but only about 600 of them voted. Most of them boycotted the election. Although there was not advance voting, there were about 40 advance votes when votes are counted. There were many people in Kyoung Sout village who could not vote, as they were not in voters list. The village head of A’ Lal Kyun ran away with ballot boxes, as so many people voted for RNDP instead of USDP.

A citizen from Sagaing Division told Burma Election Tracker, "I had to cast advance vote for USDP."

USDP အားၾကိဳတင္မဲထည့္ေပးရပါသည္။

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.

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 in Mon State who spoke with Burma Election Tracker described how authorities forced advance proxy votes for USDP.

"We parents were told that we had to cast advance proxy votes for our children living abroad at the house of village head. They started collecting advance votes 2 days ahead of the election day and every advance votes was for the lion logo (USDP). Those who refused to cast votes were fined. Some who did not agree complained to the Mon party."

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."

According to media reports, residents in villages in Mudon and Thanbyu Zayat Townships, Mon State, claimed on 6 November USDP marked ballot papers for USDP when collecting advance votes from the sick and elderly.

SOURCE: IMNA

ႏုိ၀င္ဘာလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔က မြန္ျပည္နယ္ မုဒံုၿမဳိ႕နယ္ႏွင့္ သံျဖဴဇရပ္ၿမဳိ႕နယ္ရွိ ေက်းရြာမ်ားတြင္ လူနာမ်ားႏွင့္ သက္ၾကီးရြယ္အိုမ်ားထံ ၾကဳိတင္မဲ လိုက္လံေကာက္ခံခ်ိန္တြင္ ၾကံ့ဖြံ႔ပါတီဝင္မ်ားက ကိုယ္တိုင္ မဲျခစ္ယူခဲ့သည္ဟု ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။

A citizen in Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker claimed that authorities used misinformation and fraudulent advance votes for the USDP to manipulate the election outcome.

"The village head informed everyone in our village that people over 60 years old were not allowed to vote. There are over 3,000 people over 60 in my village. One of the Election Commission members said that all of the votes of these elderly people were counted for USDP as advance votes. This election was clearly held for USDP."