On the day before Burma’s 8 November election, candidates from the two major Shan parties shared concerns with SHAN about the reliability of the country’s advanced voting process.
Sai Mon Lern, who competed on behalf of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD) for a State Assembly seat in Mong Nai Township, said that he has doubts about the validity of the electoral process.
He said: “What they [the Election Commission] are doing is not transparent. We requested that they use glue to stick the ballot bags closed in order to keep the ballots safe, but the Election Commission denied [us our request].”
He said that electoral officials told him this practice could damage the marked ballots.
Sai Mon Lern’s concerns also extend to the ballot boxes, where completed votes are submitted. He alleged that no one knows where the advanced voters’ ballots were kept after they had been collected.
Problems have also been reported in Mong Yang Township in Kengtung District, eastern Shan State.
Every eligible voter was sent a voter registration slip filled out with their details, which they had to take to polling stations in order to be able to vote. Sai Laung, a Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP) candidate in Mong Yang Township was worried about what happened to the unused voter registration slips.
He said: “There are a lot of tokens [registration slips] left, so I’m worried that anyone can take them and cast a vote.”
He said that in order to avoid fraud the SNDP had requested that voters bring their national ID cards along with their registration slips when they vote. But, he alleged that election officials did not ask for additional ID and that they were taking voter registration slips as sufficient identification to allow people to vote.
Both Sai Mon Lern (SNLD) and Sai Laung (SNDP) claimed that the names of deceased people have also reportedly been found on voting lists, but often the people currently living at the location in question are not included. They said that there were lots of mistakes involving names, parents’ names, ages and ID numbers, which are all required for voter registration in Burma.
A report on Tai Freedom’s Shan Language website on Saturday alleged that in Mongpeng Township, in Kengtung District, advanced votes had been cast using registration slips in the names of deceased people.
Sai Mon Lern said: “I don’t think it is a free and fair election.”
By SAI AW / Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN)
Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
