Kachin (unspecified township)

A citizen in Kachin State told Burma Election Tracker, "I don't vote because I'm not interested and nothing will change after the election."

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲျပီးရင္လဲဘာမွထူးျခားလာမွာမဟုတ္သလိုစိတ္၀င္စားမႈလဲမရွိသျဖင့္မဲမေပးပါ။

A resident said that people had to vote with no security because the voting booth was not covered in the polling station of the Pannwar governed by U Sakhont Tainyein, whose troops transformed into Border Guard Forces.

"There was the chairman of the quarter SPDC in front of the polling station watching and telling the voters that 'You must vote for U Sakhont Tainyein [USDP candidate] and we know who you voted for so watch out!' Therefore people had to vote for him," he added.

A resident said that although reporting to the polling station and the Election Commission about Daw Thin Thin Nwe, a member of USDP, who came in the polling station and taught the voters how to vote and tick the ballots as she liked at polling station no. 87 of Pharkant and Lonekhinn townships, there was no action taken.

Lawyer U Myint Thwin who was documenting information about the election in Kachin state said that he noted the following problems: there was the signature of the head of the polling station in the advanced votes, there wasn't the logo of the chairman of the commission, the USDP ballot boxes were not sealed--there were only seals on the NDF boxes.

A resident of Kachin State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "There will be no change. Although we participate for the good, we already know the SPDC is evil. I did not vote because the SPDC is doing what they want to."

ဘာမွထူးျခားလာမွာမဟုတ္သလို၊မိမိတို ့ကေကာင္းမယ္ထင္ျပီးလုပ္လဲSPDCမွယုတ္မာမယ္ဆုိတာၾကိဳုုသိေနလို ့ပါ။SPDC ဟာလုပ္ခ်င္တုိင္းလုပ္ေနတာျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္မဲသြားမေပးပါ။

A resident of Kachin State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "We didn't vote. In our region, we don't like the USDP. Most of the people voted for the ethnic parties and they won after the votes were counted in the evening. But the next morning we heard that the UDP had won. There was security outside and in the polling station and it was known that there was no free voting. In our house, there were 6 eligible voters but they came and gave us only 3 voting cards. So our house could only cast 3 votes. We feel that they bully the ethnic people."

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.

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 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.”

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.