Landmark elections in Myanmar have been provisionally scheduled for late next year, electoral officials said on 21st October.
On 20th October the Union Election Commission Chairman U Tin Aye assured the press that the 2015 elections would not be postponed because the constitution stated that elections must be held every five years and cannot be postponed.
On 21st October at a meeting with political parties in Yangon U Tin Aye said the 2015 election would be held in the final week of October or the first week of November.
He said the election “needs to be free and fair” so that “smart and good people” would be installed in parliament, adding that the exact date would be confirmed next August.
Myanmar authorities have promised the vote will be the freest in the country’s modern history after the military ceded direct power to a quasi-civilian government three years ago.
President U Thein Sein's government has been lauded by the international community for a range of dramatic reforms that have seen most Western sanctions lifted.
But rights groups have raised concerns that a number of prosecutions of journalists and activists this year are a sign that the country could be backsliding.
Many expect Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy to win a major slice of the legislature in the 2015 vote.
The party won almost every seat available in 2012 by-elections that saw the democracy veteran become an MP for the first time.
Parliament will select a president following the vote.
But 69-year-old Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent more than a decade under house arrest, is currently barred from taking the top job by the constitution.
Under the charter, anyone whose spouse or children are foreign nationals cannot become president -- the Nobel laureate's late husband was British, as are her two sons.
U Tin Aye, a former military general, said authorities were running trials to computerise voter lists to help avoid fraud.
The previous general election in 2010 was marred by accusations of widespread cheating, as well as by the absence of the NLD which boycotted the poll. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest just days after the vote.
