inside networks

According to inside networks, there were about 1,700 eligible voters in Pouk Taw Township constituency 5, Arakan State, but only about 600 of them voted. Most of them boycotted the election. Although there was not advance voting, there were about 40 advance votes when votes are counted. There were many people in Kyoung Sout village who could not vote, as they were not in voters list. The village head of A’ Lal Kyun ran away with ballot boxes, as so many people voted for RNDP instead of USDP.

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။

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.

Inside networks that work in Burma told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon Division, while members of the USDP canvassed for voters to tick the symbol of the Lion, the NUP objected and they quarreled and then the head of the District Election Commission and his group came and solved the problems. On the evening before the election, November 6th 2010, the USDP went around the whole quarter and showed how to tick the symbol of the Lion and asked people to do the same thing, to tick the Lion, the next day.

Inside networks who work in Burma told Burma Election Tracker that in one town ship in Rangoon Division a voter voted with one ballot paper (for only one of the three parliaments) instead of three because he didn't know. He voted again when a member of the Election Commission called him to vote with another ballot paper. When the other voters told him to vote with three ballot papers, he asked to get his third, but he saw that his third ballot paper had been signed.

Inside networks working in Burma have told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon division The head of the row houses pressured the soldiers and families in the row houses of Defense Industry to tick the symbol of Lion (USDP) when voting in advance on November 5th 2010 and they all voted from fear. There are 50 houses in this row of houses and many soldiers disagreed with that.

Inside networks working in Burma have told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon Division there was almost no one who voted between the time the polling station opened and 1pm. But the authorities announced at 2:30pm that those who did not vote would be imprisoned for 1 year, so people had to vote because of fear. In the polling station, there were 12 staff members, 3 representatives from NUP, 3 representatives from USDP, 2 security guards at each entrance and exit, altogether 22 people. There was no security at the voting booth and no proper way to ensure a secret ballot.

Inside networks reporting from Burma have told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon Division, members of the USDP said “we have already won but people just don't know about it”. Residents voted because they were afraid, since before the election they were threatened to be arrested by the authorities if they didn't vote.

Inside networks working in Burma have told Burma Election Tracker that in Rangoon Division, a female voter was not able to vote freely. She was disturbed because a member of the Election Commission watched her and other voters. Furthermore, he let voters go to the voting booth to vote in groups and watched when they voted and for which party.