USDA/USDP

The pro-government Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) opened offices across the country, with hundreds of supporters seen chanting and waving flags.

Footage captured by DVB journalists at the opening of the Mandalay office showed supporters decked out in USDP regalia and shouting victory slogans, as well as lauding the “multi-party elections” in a responsorial style led by a master of ceremonies on a nearby stage.

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 in Pegu Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described the authorities tight control over a stage managed election process tilted in favor of USDP.

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 Pegu Division reported: "In our village, people were issued USDP membership cards. Residents who have no ID were provided these for free. It was like an ID card application process. People had to fill forms and sign them. 10 out of 10 people in a family had to fill in the forms. There are 5 people in my family. I did not vote but 4 others voted. They did not need to use their fingerprints. I did not hear about advance voting. At least one person in a household had to apply for ID. Many people in our village had no interest in the election."

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 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."