Karen (unspecified division)

A voter from Karen State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I did not know which party I should vote for. But the rest of the villagers were scared of the USDP, so they voted for them."

ဘယ္ပါတီထည့္ရမွန္းမသိေတာ့မဲမထည့္ဘူး၊က်ေနာ္တို ့တရြာလံုးကေတာ့USDPကုိေၾကာက္လို ့ခည့္လိုက္ရတယ္။

About 600 villagers who fled to Thailand’s Phop Phra District due to fighting between Burmese government troops and a breakaway Karen rebel group, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army Brigade 5, were repatriated by Thai authorities on Wednesday. Authorities said that the fighting was over. The refugees crossed into Thai soil on Sunday when fighting erupted on the Thai-Burmese border.

Hundreds of refugees have fled a second wave of fighting along Burma’s border with Thailand close to Waw Lay, a former stronghold of a breakaway Karen army faction.

Estimates of the number of people sheltering in Thailand’s Phop Phra district, in Tak province, vary: a source on the border told DVB that 350 refugees fled, while the Bangkok Post put the figure at 600.

With advanced voting arranged three days before the elections in Phapun town, the authorities set up just one polling station at the township football ground for the rest, who had not voted earlier.

“Advance votes were collected on November 4, 5 and 6. Therefore, there was only one polling station at the football ground in Phapun town,” a resident told KIC.

There were three ballot boxes for the NUP, the USDP and independent candidates. Most voters ticked the rice stalk logo and voted for the USDP, according to a resident.

A Karen State citizen told Burma Election Tracker: "I didn't vote because I don't think my vote will go to the party I like. Even if the party I like win, there won't be anything new for us because this government controls everything, such as our houses. There is some intimidation of people who are refusing to vote. Teachers had to cast an advanced vote for USDP on the 6th of November. I didn't see many people going to the polling station." |

A voter spoke to Burma Election Tracker and said: "When the quarter authorities came and told us to vote for the USDP, we refused. So they took our family list and also took our ID. I think they took us as advanced votes. We didn't go and vote. I think military will go on governing the country".

A voter from Karen State who spoke with Burma Election Tracker said: "I voted for NUP, because they required to me to vote. But I don't really like it. There are soldiers surrounding the station, a few people are in voting. There is no election knowledge."

Complaints about lack of knowledge about the electoral process and forced voting have been recurrent during the 2010 election in Burma.

“တစည ကိုထည့္ဆိုလို႔ ထည့္ေပးလိုက္တယ္။ ၾကိဳက္လို႔ေတာ့မဟုတ္ဘူး။ စစ္သားေတြခ်ထားသလို႕ မဲေပးသူနည္းတယ္။ အသိပညာေပးတာမရွိဘူး။” ဟုကရင္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ မဲေပးသူတစ္ဦးက Burma Election Tracker သို႕ေျပာသည္။

During the first week of June 2010, inside networks documented cases in which SPDC departments which deal with military government administration came in and demanded money from village residents in Central Karen State. SPDC administrative members traveled outside the normal urban setting of their offices to collect money, which is extremely unusual. Inside network researchers claim that this is a "fundraising" activity in the pre-election period, with these governmental officials collecting funding for the Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP).

Residents of Karen State say that since the beginning of August, SPDC troops operating in most of Karen
State areas have placed more restrictions on local people in the lead up to the elections. Restrictions
include, preventing them from going out of their villages, investigating people while on trips, asking for
family registration lists, taking records and even asking for money.

Burmese authorities in Three Pagodas Pass (TPP) town on the Thai Burma-Border, last night arrested over 50 TPP residents who were caught out along the main road after 9 pm at night.

As of October 27th, the residents of TPP are subject to a 9 pm curfew. News of the curfew has reportedly not been widely circulated.

According to an arrested resident, the arrested individuals included children, adults, and youths. Reportedly, those arrested widely claimed they had not heard about TPP’s newest curfew.