Rangoon (unspecified township)

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.

A citizen from Rangoon told Burma Election Tracker, "I don't vote because I mistrust this election."

ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအားအယံုအၾကည္မရွိသျဖင့္မဲမေပးပါ။

A military official shares his experiences: "Lion and Rice Branch (USDP and NUP) campaigned in my neighborhood before the elections. I was at home on the Election Day. I didn't vote for any party. Family members of military officials had to vote for USDP. That's why I didn't vote because it wouldn't make any difference. I'm not sure about the security because I live in a military compound. There were USDP and NUP members in the polling station. Military officers' family went to the polling station by car because of being a military families.

A citzen from Rangoon who spoke to Burma Election Tracker described the fear many people felt surrounding the elections, as well as USDP vote buying.

"I voted in Hmaw Bi and voted equally for NUP, KPP, and USDP party. I considered casting vote as a duty. I worried that I would be arrested if I made a mistake while casting vote. Stresses went away and I felt secured after casting vote. USDP party was offering loans to villagers as inducement. People were asked for Loke Ar Pay (Forced labor) on the 6th of November."

Inside networks reported that election officials in Rangoon manipulated results in favor of USDP.

The polling station No. 2 of 2nd Ward, Hlaing Township opened at 5:50 in the morning. When a representative saw voting cards in a voting box, officials replied that they opened the station at the exact time ordered to open. They also replied that some people came early and voted. There were five to ten voting cards already there. An official from the polling station reported that when the station was closed and votes were counted, some invalid votes were added to the USDP vote list.

According to inside networks, in Rangoon observers witnessed USDP members overly engaged when votes were counted. They did not reject actually invalid votes but rejected many votes for other parties as invalid votes instead.

ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း လိႈင္ျမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ မဲစာရင္းစစ္ေသာအခါ ေ႔ရွမွၾကံ ႔ခိုင္းေရးေတြက ပိတ္ရပ္ထားတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ပယ္မဲေတြကိုလည္း မပယ္ဘူး။ မပယ္သင္တဲ့မဲေတြကိုလညး္ပယ္ခဲ့ံတယ္။ ဥပမာ ၾကံ႔ခိုင္ေရးရဲ ႔ပယ္မဲအမ်ားစုကို မပယ္ဘူး။ တစ္ျခားပါတီရဲ႕ မဲေတြကို ပယ္မဲအျဖစ္နဲ႔ လုပ္လိုက္တယ္လို႕ မ်က္ျမင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။

A citizen in Rangoon Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker noted how authorities used a lack of voter education to push for USDP votes.

Inside networks reporting from Burma have told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon Division U Aung Than Oo, the chairman of the rice merchants association, who competed as the USDP representative for the Regional Parliament, met 9 people from local villages at the 100 tons rice mill and told them that he would give each village 500,000 Kyats if the USDP won 90% and 400,000 Kyats if they won 75%. Moreover, he promised that he would pay 100,00 Kyats to each the members of EC and gave 1 million to each of the rice mills from the villages.

A voter from Rangoon Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "I got the news that I had to cast a vote. I called my home and I was told that the Ward Peace and Development Council was conducting a family household survey. I returned home but did not vote. When they came to my house to survey the household members, I said I would not cast a vote, but they told me I had to vote. They got my name. It was USDP members who collected the household number. I am not interested in this election. I did not cast a vote. I went to polling station just to observe.

A voter from Rangoon Division who spoke to Burma Election Tracker said: "Before the election, Lion (USDP), Fighting Peacocks (UMFNP and GSUM), Bamboo hat (NDF) and individual candidates canvassed for votes. I didn't go back home. I didn't vote because authority collected advance votes at early one month and I was late. I didn't cast vote. I'm unhappy because I can't vote for the party I like. I watched when I was waiting at the bus near the polling station. I didn't see clearly because of the distance. There was no intimidation. Campaign songs were playing at every single polling station.