How A Burmese Election Works
A friend of a friend, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, has just returned from Burma. She was sent by one of the media outlets she works for, who told her to head up for a few days, pose as a tourist, and very gingerly snoop around to see if she could learn anything about the election and how it was playing out. Despite the fact that up to (and possibly more than) 100,000 people have just been killed by cyclone Nargis, and many thousands more are slowly dying due to lack of water, food and medicine (which is sitting at airports around the world on airplanes that the generals refuse allow in), the military geniuses in charge of running the country into the ground have decided to go ahead with a referendum that will allow people to vote for a new charter. A yes vote means the military will retain its enormous power; a no vote would send a clear sign that people are unhappy and would either a) force the government to relax its power; or b) completely ignore the results; guess which is most likely. Without even getting into the insanity of holding an election (and using up precious resources) in the midst of cleaning up after one of Asia’s worst natural disasters, here’s what my friend found out about how elections work in Burma.
My friend wandered around town for a day or so, until she managed to strike up a conversation with a fellow who would talk to her about how you vote. This is very rare in Burma - government snoops are everywhere, and if they hear you talking trash, you’re in big, big trouble. He said that armed soldiers were going door-to-door, asking people if they’d voted yet. If you said no, they said “Come with me,” and led you to the voting station.
Once there, you had to go into a little booth to fill out the form - yes or no, simple. Except that you had to write your name and address on the form, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. Once you came out of the booth, you were faced with two boxes - one marked ‘yes’ and one marked ‘no’, with more armed soldiers standing around.
The man recounted a story that he heard about a very drunk guy going in to vote, who got confused and put his vote in the ‘no’ box, and was arrested on the spot. That does sound a bit far-fetched, but then again, knowing the sad state of affairs in Burma, it might be the truth.
Sad, sad, sad.
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