SPDC (current regime)

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 resident in Rangoon Division explained his experiences on electoral activities that: "Household registration lists were collected one month ahead of the election day and it was said that ballot slips would be given to people who received tokens. I observed firsthand on; distribution of sample ballot slips, distribution of tokens 4-5 days before the election day, registering voter names and registration numbers on tokens, collection of advance votes from elderly and disabled people, and banning voters from traveling. Phone connections were cut before and during 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.

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 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."