Karen (unspecified division)

A citizen in Karen State who spoke with Burma Election Tracker described the lack of voter education.

"I knew that I had to vote on the November 7, but I actually did not have good understanding on it. No one explained about the election. I did not cast advance, and I did not vote on the election day also. I have been hearing announcements but don't understand."

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."

A citizen from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described how SPDC officials abused their authority to force advance votes for USDP.

"I did not vote myself. Following orders of senior chiefs, commanders serving in military battalions had to cast advance votes for USDP. Ward Peace and Development Council cast advance votes for family members for USDP."

A citizen in Karen State who spoke with Burma Election Tracker described authorities' strategy for securing USDP votes through abuse of power, misinformation, and forced voting.

A resident from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I heard about the elections. I also heard that people were supposed to vote for the USDP. I went home. I couldn't vote because my name was not on the household member list. My family members voted. I don't know which party they voted for. We were provided with voting cards and voting was mandatory. There were no threats and no persuasion door to door. Not many people voted. Some people voted because they were provided voting cards. In the late afternoon of the election day, the situation went bad.

A voter from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I voted for another party rather than the USDP. There were so many rules and restrictions at the polling station which were not relevant to voting, such as: 'Cannot chew Bettle nut', 'No Hats', 'No shirts with long sleeves."

These types of rules could be used to refuse access to polling stations, thus limiting the number of voters.

A Karen citizen told Burma Election Tracker why they were unable to vote at all: "No one told me about how to vote. And no one came to take advanced votes, so I did not vote." | မည္သူမွလာေရာက္ေျပာၾကားျခင္းမရွိသျဖင့္မဲေပးရမည္ကုိမသိပါ။ၾကိဳတင္မဲလဲလာေရာက္ေကာက္ခံျခင္းမရွိပါ။

A voter explained to Burma Election Tracker how they were not able to vote during the election: "When I went to vote I was not on the voter list. I felt upset about this. I didn't go and talk to the head of village however, because I was not interested that much in the election." | မဲစာရင္းမပါလို ့မဲမေပးသျဖင့္စိတ္ထဲတြင္ကသိကေအာင့္ျဖစ္ရပါသည္။ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအားစိတ္၀င္စားမႈသိပ္မရွိေသာေၾကာင့္ရြာလူၾကီးလည္းသြားမေျပာေတာ့ပါ။

A Karen citizen spoke of intimidation during the voting process to Burma Election Tracker: "I was at home but heard the election news by broadcast. I voted for USDP. The polling station was not a secure place while voting. I felt like I was closely watched all the time. I would not feel safe for my family if I did not vote for USDP. Many people were watching when I cast my vote. Some people were taking photos, but they looked like they were trying to stay unnoticed. There was some intimidation. Some USDP members were there also. Security officers were in civilian clothes.

During interview with a Karen state citizen, Burma Election Tracker was told: "The USDP asked the population and said they will come again to provide voting ballots but they didn't, so we had to vote in advance. Everyone was unhappy and not interested on this election. There were many security officers in the village.