violations of election laws

Three candidates from the National Democratic Force (NDF) who stood for election in Rangoon's Thanlyin Township—Dr Aung Naing for the People's Parliament (Lower House), Khin Maung Lwin Oo for the Nationalities Parliament (Upper House) and Aung Naing Htun for the Rangoon Division Parliament—refused to sign an Election Commission document stating that they agreed the vote-counting process was fair and acknowledging that they have lost the election in Thanlyin Township.

Over 500 residents of urban wards in northern Arakan's Buthidaung Township in western Burma were unable to exercise their franchise in Sunday's election, the first nationwide polls in 20 years, after their names were deleted from the voters list by the Election Commission.

U Tun Aung Thein, a candidate of the RNDP contesting for state parliament in Constituency 2 in Buthidaung, told Narinjara that most of those who were excluded from the voters list were from Ward No. 4 and 5 in Buthidaung.

A candidate of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Namkham, Kyaw Myint aka Li Yongqiang (51), a well-known Panhsay militia chief and druglord from Namkham argued with members of Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP) over USDP’s vote buying and vote cheating in polling stations, local sources reported.

Widespread intimidation of voters and violation of election laws were reported throughout Maungdaw as residents of Arakan State voted in today’s national election.

An organizer of the National Democratic Party for Development (NDPD) said officials and candidates of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) forcibly removed NDPD officials from polling stations, where they were to serve as election monitors.

USDP party members also openly urged voters at polling stations to support the Burmese junta-backed party.

The ruling military junta in Burma blatantly grabbed votes for its own party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), by abusing its authority through acts of voter fraud during yesterday’s election, eyewitnesses said.

“The Chief of quarter administration stood in front of the polling station and told all voters ‘you all should vote for the USDP’s Zahkung Ting Ying. We see and know who you are voting for, so be careful’. So, all the people voted for Ting Ying,” said a local source in Pangwa, the headquarters of the former armed group, the New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K).

Speaking to Burma Election Tracker, an elderly person said: "Before Nov 7, 2010, people were pressured and told repeatedly by chairperson of TPDC to vote for the USDP, but I voted for my ethnic party. No matter if they wins or not, I have committed myself to support the Mon party."

“နုိ၀င္ဘာလ(၇) ရက္မေရာက္မီွ ျခေသၤ့ပါတီကုိ မဲေပးေစရမည္ မ.ယ.က ဥကဌကအၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ဖိအားေပးခဲ့ေသာ္လည္းပဲ အဘကေတာ့ ကုိယ့္လူမ်ဳိးပါတီကုိပဲ မဲေပးခဲ့သည္။ ရွဳံးသည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ နိုင္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ မြန္ပါတီကုိပဲ အားေပးသြားမယ္” ဟုမဲေပးခဲ့သူအဘတဦးက Burma Election Tracker သို႕ေျပာၾကားသြားခဲ့သည္။

Polling Station Officers' Bias: Polling officers urged voters to vote for the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Thingangyun, Thaketa and Kayan of Rangoon Division, in Thabeikkyin in Mandalay Division and in Kamma in Magwe Division.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19984

ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း၊ သဃၤန္းကၽြန္း၊ သာေကတႏွင့္ ခရမ္းျမိဳ႕နယ္မ်ား၊ မႏၱေလးတိုင္း၊ သပိတ္က်င္းျမိဳ႕နယ္ႏွင့္၊ မေကြးတုိင္း၊ ကံမျမိဳ႕နယ္တို႕တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရေက်ာေထာက္ေနာက္ခံ ၾကံ့ဖြံ႕ပါတီကို မဲေပးရန္ မဲရံုတာဝန္ခံမ်ားက တိုက္တြန္းေျပာဆိုခဲ့ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။

Polling Station Officers' Bias: Polling officers urged voters to vote for the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Thabeikkyin in Mandalay Division.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19984

Polling Station Officers' Bias: Polling officers urged voters to vote for the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in Thingangyun, Thaketa and Kayan of Rangoon Division.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19984

The USDP cast their own votes, collected votes from citizens, and "corrected" ballots while the Ward Sub-Commission collected advanced votes townships in Mon State. The voting rooms were described as "not secured."

ၾကံ့ဖြံ႕ပါတီ သူတို႕မဲေတြ သူတို႕ေပးခဲ့တယ္။ ျပည္သူမ်ားဆီမွလည္း မဲေကာက္ယူခဲ့တယ္၊ ျပီးေတာ့ မြန္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ရက္ကြက္ေကာ္မရွင္ခြဲေတြက ၾကိဳတင္မဲ လိုက္ေကာက္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ သူတို႕ကမဲေတြကို လိုက္ျပင္တယ္။ မဲပးတဲ့အခန္းေတြကို “လံုျခံဳမႈမရွိဘူး” လို႕ေျပာေနၾကတယ္။