Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeEditorialMyanmar's upcoming election: An unfair ballot repeated?

Myanmar’s upcoming election: An unfair ballot repeated?

-

If we look closely at the topics that are discussed in the Hluttaw [Parliament] and at those of the government and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), we can see that the USDP, the army and its fellows, who changed from army uniform to ordinary clothes, are working hard to win the 2015 elections, once more.

During the 2010 elections, the USDP did not have to compete greatly with other parties in regions where the majority are Burmans, such as in Rangoon and Mandalay, and it easily won the elections in those regions. However, because it had to compete with ethnic parties in ethnic areas, the USDP used unfair methods which enabled it to win the elections in these regions.

The Union Election Commission (UEC) gathered voter-lists and even counted the household members who had already passed away as well as those on holiday or working abroad and even added family members who were not on their household documents. Due to the UEC submitting all those invalid voters as pre-votes (advance votes) to the USDP ballot box, the USDP subsequently won the 2010 elections

The UEC used all votes from the ethnic youths (both males and females) in ethnic areas, particularly Karen, Karenni, Shan and Mon states and those working in Thailand, as advance votes, and it gave them to the USDP. Thus, the USDP won [numerous constituencies] elections in ethnic areas. Although some ethnic parties truly won the elections in their areas, they were overturned due to the advance votes used by the USDP.

How about in this forthcoming 2015 election? The USDP will have to compete with the National League for Democracy (NLD) party, and because of that, circumstances have changed for the USDP.

The public will support the NLD more because of it’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Therefore, in the areas where the majority is Burmans, it is possible that the people will lean towards the NLD.

How is the current government planning to win this election? Firstly, if we look at the UEC, the UEC is not a mediator. On the contrary, it is chaired by U Tin Aye, who is from the USDP and the majority of its [UEC] members are army officials. It is difficult to say if the the UEC will stay impartial and hard to believe that the UEC would stand as a mediator during this election.

In Burma, there are lot of educated people and experts, but why do they [UEC] appoint mediators? Because the state level, division level, township level and village tract level election commissions have to listen to the UEC and its command, everyone can speculate which ballot boxes the votes will more likely go into.

Moreover, the question remains, whether the UEC is planning to distort the data, even up to 70% of the voter-list data, or make a mistake, because the UEC have already counted the people who passed away as valid voters, while there are people alive that have been omitted and people whose names are included but their parents names are wrong. Even the population of Myanmar given is not 100% accurate yet.
There are many youths who are eligible to vote but working abroad. The UEC does not provide an opportunity for these migrant workers to vote abroad, for them [workers], their personal rights [to vote] are abused.

Currently, if we look closely at how hard the UEC has been working, it is clear the USDP will win the elections again and the NLD and ethnic political parties will lose. Hence, IMNA would like to report that from the information we can discern that the upcoming election will be a similar repeat of the last election. Filled with unjust operations.

Related articles

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Stay Connected

29,338FansLike
0FollowersFollow
409FollowersFollow
20,600SubscribersSubscribe

Latest posts