Yangon local government has claimed a small victory in the race to make upcoming elections planned for November free and fair – or at least look it – after very few people complained about voter lists published earlier this month.
But don’t celebrate yet. It could be because very few people actually checked the lists.
Out of more than 200,000 eligible voters in 10 townships, only 8,600 responded with a complaint after the lists were published, The Myanmar Times reported, quoting an unnamed official.
Some 2,900 people said the facts of an entry were wrong, 1,200 contested the presence of some of the names (maybe because the person was dead) and a further 4,500 people said their names had been omitted.
That might sound like a lot, but it amounts to a small fraction of total eligible voters. Errors in voter lists are to be expected. The low number in this case might have less to do with bureaucratic efficiency than that few people caught the faults, according to Daw Mya Nandar, from the New Myanmar Foundation.
“Public interest in the election and related electoral processes is very low. I think this [result] is because information did not reach most residents,” she told the Myanmar Times. “Wrong names and names of dead people were included. This happens in elections.”
Government officials are making the corrections, and lists from 14 more townships are due out in May.
