Mon (unspecified township)

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 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 person from Mon State said: "I heard about the election news that people were not interested about candidates. No one in my house voted. We did not also cast advance votes. We did not vote because we think this election is not fair. We stayed without voting following what Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged people to. There are not many people interested about the election and I do not have any hope from it as it is not meant to be for civilians, only for the wealth of the military government. People are angry with it."

A citizen in Mon State who spoke with Burma Election Tracker described how authorities forced advance proxy votes for USDP.

"We parents were told that we had to cast advance proxy votes for our children living abroad at the house of village head. They started collecting advance votes 2 days ahead of the election day and every advance votes was for the lion logo (USDP). Those who refused to cast votes were fined. Some who did not agree complained to the Mon party."

A citizen in Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker claimed that authorities used misinformation and fraudulent advance votes for the USDP to manipulate the election outcome.

"The village head informed everyone in our village that people over 60 years old were not allowed to vote. There are over 3,000 people over 60 in my village. One of the Election Commission members said that all of the votes of these elderly people were counted for USDP as advance votes. This election was clearly held for USDP."

A voter from Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I heard that everyone in my village needed to vote. Parents were instructed to bring everyone from their households who are away. If not they will be fined. So, I went home to vote. I saw the polling station was opened at the school. I saw that voters did not seem to be happy. There were some people watching around the polling station. Some people went there to vote. I didn't vote. I didn't know about the USDP but I heard about the logos, Lion and Rice branch. I'm not interested in the elections. I don't have any hope."

A resident of Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I heard that there would be elections. I didn't go home to vote. My father, mother, younger sister and elder brother voted, and voted for the USDP. The reason was that they were provided with voting cards at home (with Lion logo). Also they were threatened to vote on November 7, of course for the USDP. Many migrant workers like me couldn't vote. I don't have any hope from the elections."

A voter from Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "In Mon State, Mon villagers were very anxious to vote for the Mon state party. Since SPDC knew this, the army and the chairman of the village together threatened the Mon people to vote for SPDC. Some voted for the USDP just because of fear. Because of taking many advanced votes, there were a few voters voting on the election day."

These types of violations have been pervasive in Burma's election.

A voter from Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "The Township Peace and Development Council directed the village head to urge individual houses to cast advance votes. Villagers were told that they would no longer need to go to the polling station if they cast advance votes. They would be able to resume farming and other works as usual. There are not many educated people in our village and so many cast advance votes."

A voter from Mon State who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "There were over 4,500 eligible voters in our village. I voted for Nai Lawi Aung who is a member of the Mon ethnic party. Most of the people voted for Mon. The USDP lost the vote in my Township and spoke the head of the village. They (USDP and village head) assembled villagers and frightened them asking why they voted for the Mon party. Four men and 3 women answered that they are Mon therefore they chose to vote for Mon party whatever the result will be. All these 7 people were fined 5,000 kyat each for saying that.