violations of election laws

The censorship board in military-ruled Burma, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), has said that media may not publish or air reports about nationwide vote rigging in Sunday's election, according to sources.

An editor from the PSRD reportedly said opposition candidates told domestic media about vote rigging in the election, which was dominated by the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), but the PSRD will not allow media groups to carry such reports.

As votes are counted in the first election in Burma in 20 years, the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) seems to be leading in many constituencies in Kachin State because of advance votes, said the opposition parties.

In Hpakant township, the National Democratic Force (NDF) party candidate, Daw Bawk Ja, was leading when the polls closed. However, the USDP candidate, former Northern Regional commander Maj-Gen Ohn Myint, forged ahead when the advance votes were added.

Burma's “three princesses”—the daughters of former prime ministers—each ran as candidates for the Democratic Party (Myanmar) and each suffered defeat in Sunday's polls, which were marred by widespread fraud and abuse of the electoral process by the military regime and its proxy party, the United Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).

A Kachin state citizen advised through interview that "I have Voted invalid ballot. There are USDP members inside the voting station. They provided bread and organized the people but not election education." | မဲေပးသည္။ ပယ္မဲေပးခဲ့သည္။ မဲရံုမ်ားတြင္ ၾကံ့ဖြံ႕မ်ားခ်ထားသည္။ ၾကံ့ဖြံ႕မွ မုန္႔ေ၀၊ ဦးထုတ္မ်ားေပးျပီး စည္းရံုးေရးဆင္းေနသည္။ လူထုကို ပညာေပးတာမရွိေပ။

A citizen advised that on election day, "The Police, USDP, Red Cross and Custom members are strictly checking voters. They already planned to make me vote for USDP"
ရဲ/ၾကံဖြံ႕/ၾကက္ေျခနီ/အေကာက္ခြန္မ်ား ရွိျပီး စစ္ေဆးေရးမ်ားလုပ္ေနပါသည္။ ၾကံဖြံ႕ပါတီအားမဲထည့္ရန္ လွ်ာထားသတ္မွတ္သည့္အတြက္ ၾကံဖြံ႕အားမဲေပးခဲ့သည္။

A Kachin state resident interviewed by Burma Election Tracker said: "Police and USDP members surrounded the ballot station as security guards. There was no ballot station for Kachin ethnic voters, so most of them did not vote and those voted did had no knowledge about the election. They voted because they were told to. I don't think the election will bring change.”

A landslide victory for a pro-regime party in Burma’s election has stirred anger among opponents, who claim there was widespread cheating in Sunday’s controversial ballot. Unofficial results suggest that the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) could take about 80 percent of seats in the new parliament. This reverses earlier forecasts of a sizeable opposition bloc that could check the executive’s power.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Tuesday, Sai Maung Maung Aye said that neither the votes that he received nor the votes for National Democratic Force (NDF) candidate Buak Ja would top the advance votes received by the USDP candidate, former BSO 6 Chief Lt-Gen Ohn Myint, in Hpakant Township.

“I cannot accept the result of the election because I don’t think it was free and fair. I won't sign the form recognizing the winner of the election,” said Mar Khar, an NDF candidate in Myintkyinar Township, Kachin State.

According to a source in Chin State, voting in the township happened without National Registration Cards being checked. The same source also said that "the USDP gave a present while they campaigned" and then forced people to vote.

Candidates for the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP), the most popular ethnic party in Shan State which is also known as the “White Tiger Party,” were defeated by candidates from the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the Burmese military regime's proxy party, with the help of rigged votes and unfairly obtained advance votes, local sources say.

In Taunggyi, SNDP candidate Hla Yeir Htut said the junta began collecting advance votes on Nov. 5 under questionable circumstances.