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Welcome to the tenth edition of Election Insider, where we take you behind the headlines to explain what’s really going on as Myanmar gears up for the November 8 election. This week, we’re taking a closer look at the election commission's disenfranchisement of most of Rakhine State's voters, and asking what this means for minority representation in politics.

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Has the UEC gerrymandered Rakhine? A closer look at the mass voting cancellations

By Ben Dunant and Kaung Hset Naing

The intensifying war between the Tatmadaw and Arakan Army seemed to make the large-scale cancellation of voting in Rakhine State inevitable. It looked particularly likely in rural areas of northern Rakhine, where voters had fled their homes, local government administrators had abandoned their posts and election officials feared to tread.

Elections are huge logistical exercises that require a sturdy backbone of local administration – it is local ward or village officials and school teachers who really get the vote done, not the venerable men in taikpones sitting in Nay Pyi Taw – and it is precisely this local government apparatus that has shattered amid the conflict in the state.

Moreover, the conjunction of armed conflict with a state-wide COVID-19 lockdown and the restriction of mobile internet in seven townships to virtually unusable 2G connections had made campaigning virtually impossible for many candidates in Rakhine. In addition, eligible voters among more than 200,000 internally displaced people risked being excluded. Even if polling stations were to open across the state, the election’s credibility would be in serious doubt, and many would ask why voters and polling officers were being placed in unnecessary danger.

Cancellations of townships and individual wards and village tracts were also a feature of the 2010 and 2015 general elections and attracted only muted controversy. In 2015, voting was cancelled in seven townships in Shan State and 404 village tracts in Bago Region and  Shan, Kachin, Mon and Kayin states. In most of these areas, voting could not go ahead because of a lack of Myanmar government infrastructure in areas controlled by ethnic armed groups, rather than because of active conflict.

However, the Union Election Commission’s announcement on October 16 that the vote was cancelled outright in more than half of Rakhine’s 17 townships, and in dozens of village tracts and urban wards elsewhere in the state, was a more sweeping act of disenfranchisement than almost anyone had imagined possible.

State election sub-commission secretary Thurein Htut told Election Insider that a staggering 1,200,901, or 73 percent, of the state’s 1,649,753 voters will now be unable to cast a ballot. This does not include the estimated 600,000 Rohingya in Rakhine, who were largely stripped of their voting rights ahead of the 2015 election and remain disenfranchised.

The UEC has also cancelled voting in six whole townships and dozens of village tracts – and unusually, urban wards – in Shan State, as well as in parts of Bago Region and Kachin, Kayin and Mon states (see this useful map).

However, outside of Rakhine, there are fewer cancellations than in the 2015 election. Kayin State in particular has seen a significant extension of voting; while 94 village tracts were cancelled in 2015, this year only 53 are. Locals interviewed by ethnic media outlet the Karen Information Centre credited the expansion to effective coordination between the government and the Karen National Union, a Karen armed group.

Although the distribution of cancellations broadly reflects how the conflict map has changed over the last five years – growing quieter in Kachin, for instance, after a flare-up in 2018, and with an ever-deepening quagmire in Rakhine – the devil is in the details. Legitimate security concerns could provide a cover for the UEC to strike out areas adjacent to conflict zones where elections are actually viable. This type of deliberate overreach is made even easier in the absence of detailed published criteria for cancelling voting.

Sure enough, the UEC has revealed no real criteria for its decisions. In an October 20 press conference, commissioner Myint Naing merely said it had considered “whether voters would be able to cast ballots for their favourite candidates and the sub-commissions would be able to do their jobs without any intimidation”. He also insisted the commission was “not acting on its own” but deciding “based on the recommendation of the government”.

While the military is the most likely source of any security recommendation, Tatmadaw spokesperson Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun told both RFA Burmese and Daily Eleven that the cancellations didn’t match the military’s recommendations. They were “greater than what the Tatmadaw recommended”, he told Daily Eleven. This leaves the National League for Democracy-led civilian government, which has a vested interest in cancellations that pre-empt wins by opposition parties.

Whether or not this interest motivated the cancellations, their biggest effect was an immediate and dramatic re-drawing of the Rakhine electoral map in a way that substantially benefits the NLD. The ruling party has the opportunity to preserve its stronghold in southern Rakhine, while the Rakhine nationalist Arakan National Party has been robbed of its core constituencies in the north and centre.

Since the UEC announced its decision, Rakhine politicians and civil society activists who spoke to Election Insider have not held back in decrying what they see as a blatant attempt by the NLD-appointed election commission to help secure the ruling party another landslide victory at the expense of ethnic parties. This motive is easy to impute in Rakhine, where the NLD performed worst out of any state or region in the last general election in 2015.

“The UEC is abusing its power to manipulate [the election],” Kyaw Zaw Oo, vice-chair of the Arakan Front Party, told Election Insider. “They are making it so the big party will win by not holding the election in areas where Rakhine parties will definitely win.”

The Rakhine townships that will be by-passed entirely by the vote are Rathedaung, Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, Minbya, Buthidaung, Maungdaw, Ponnagyun, Myebon and Pauktaw. This means that nine out of 17 Pyithu Hluttaw and seven out of 12 Amyotha Hluttaw seats in the state will not be filled. Voting was also cancelled in the state hluttaw constituencies of Ann-2 and Taungup-1, raising the total number of elected state-level seats in Rakhine where there will be no ballot to 20 out of 34.

Of the 36 cancelled seats in Rakhine across all parliaments, 33 seats, or 93pc, correspond to areas won by the ANP in 2015. Meanwhile, of the 28 seats for which voting will proceed, including the directly elected Chin ethnic affairs minister position in the state government, 15 seats, or 54pc, were won by the NLD in Rakhine’s southern townships.

Before the cancellations, the NLD’s chances in Rakhine looked bleaker than in the last general election – even in the face of a fractured Rakhine nationalist bloc. Since 2015, when the ANP won a majority of the elected seats in the state hluttaw and emerged as the third largest party in the Union parliament, some disgruntled members have broken away to form two rival parties. These are the reconstituted Arakan League for Democracy, which contested the 1990 election, and the Arakan Front Party, founded by former ANP chair Aye Maung, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for high treason for accusing the NLD government in a January 2018 public speech of treating the Rakhine people “like slaves”.

Despite this factionalism, the NLD would have been unlikely to have benefited much from vote splitting between Rakhine parties even if the election had gone ahead in the state’s northern and central townships. In 2015, NLD candidates won only a tiny fraction of the vote in these townships (3pc in the Pyithu Hluttaw race in Sittwe and 4pc in Mrauk-U, for instance), and since then anti-NLD feeling in Rakhine has only hardened in reaction to government oppression.

While the political implications of the Rakhine cancellations are clear to see, the absence of neighbouring Paletwa Township in southern Chin from the October 16 announcement has only heightened suspicions of gerrymandering. The NLD won all five seats corresponding with Paletwa in 2015 (with a victory margin of more than 30pc of the vote in the Pyithu Hluttaw race), and many see this as the only explanation for why voting is apparently being allowed to proceed in a township that has seen more deadly clashes between the Arakan Army and Tatmadaw than most Rakhine townships.

Voting cancellations were announced in two rounds in 2015, on October 12 and 27 of that year, leaving open the possibility that Paletwa will later be cancelled. Sure enough, commissioner Myint Naing said during the October 20 press conference that the UEC was reviewing the status of Paletwa, as well as Ann Township in Rakhine – although given that all village tracts and some urban wards have already been cancelled in Ann, this could mean either a reprieve for the township’s voters or further disenfranchisement.

Pe Than, a senior ANP member who was seeking re-election to the Pyithu Hluttaw seat for Myebon, told Election Insider, “The election is going ahead in Paletwa because the NLD won seats there.” He believed the exemption of Paletwa coupled with the decision to cancel voting in Rakhine’s Pauktaw Township gave the UEC’s game away. Pauktaw was cancelled despite having seen no armed clashes this year; the only thing that could explain the decision, he said, was that the ANP holds all seats in the township.

Executive director of the Yangon-based Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security Min Zaw Oo seemed to share Pe Than’s incredulity. On the day after the UEC’s announcement, he uploaded to Facebook a table showing the number of clashes recorded by MIPS since the start of the year in Rakhine townships and Paletwa. Topping the chart was Paletwa, with 90 clashes. At the bottom, with zero clashes, was Pauktaw.

The UEC’s opaque decision-making only feeds this incredulity and suspicion. The constitution and electoral law enable it to cancel voting in any constituency, or part of a constituency, where a “free and fair election cannot be held due to natural disaster or due to the local security situation”. The law mentions no criteria for making this determination and does not establish the need to seek or abide by the recommendations of the government or military.

Constituencies where voting has been cancelled entirely can be contested in future by-elections if the UEC judges that conditions have improved, but these won’t happen until April 2022 at the earliest, according to the rule that a by-election cannot be held within the first or last year of a government’s term.

Despite the lengthy vacuum of parliamentary representation that this would entail, it might nonetheless seem like a fairer deal than the one dealt to voters in Rakhine townships where voting is going ahead despite the cancellation of most wards and village tracts, making any result grossly unrepresentative of the townships’ eligible voters. Polling stations will be absent in 93pc of Taungup’s wards and village tracts, 89 pc of Ann’s, and 73pc of Kyaukphyu’s. Weighted for population, as few as 5pc of voters will be able to cast ballots in Taungup. The limiting of polling stations to a small number of mostly urban neighbourhoods will also put parties with a more rural base at a huge disadvantage.

It also appears to be contrary to electoral law. The corresponding laws for Pyithu Hluttaw, Amyotha Hluttaw and state and regional hluttaw elections all say that “if 51pc of all voters have casted the votes, it may be designated as a completed election”. This is a strangely worded provision, because it suggests that results would be cancelled in situations of low voter turnout. This rule, if applicable, has not previously been enforced (consider that average turnout in Kayin State was just 46pc in 2015) and the UEC seems intent on ignoring it in the current situation as well. UEC chairperson Hla Thein told VOA Burmese in an October 12 interview that the 51pc threshold only applied to constitutional referenda, despite the fact that it is mentioned in the laws that govern elections for all parliaments.

Again, the ANP appears to be hurt most by selective disenfranchisement at the sub-township level. For instance, the cancellation of village tracts and wards are such that voting will go ahead in the state constituency of Ann-1, which was won by the Union Solidarity and Development Party in 2015 (with no small help from the large resident population of Tatmadaw soldiers and their dependents), but will not go ahead in Ann-2, which was won by the ANP.

In addition, the AFP’s Kyaw Zaw Oo said the decision to cancel voting in 54 ward and village tracts of the 74 in Kyaukphyu would handicap Rakhine parties in the Amyotha Hluttaw constituency of Rakhine-1. This is because the constituency also covers Munaung Township, where the NLD won the largest share of votes in 2015 by a comfortable margin, and where voting is going ahead in full.

With all these barriers to voting and to fair competition between parties, the election will deliver a state parliament that cannot credibly claim to represent Rakhine. Most of the 15 elected members (compared to 35 after the 2015 election) will only be accountable to voters in the more NLD-friendly south of the state – and in several cases only to a fraction of eligible voters in their constituencies. “Armed conflict may get worse,” the ANP’s Pe Than said, “but there will be no MPs who can talk about stopping the war. Human rights violations and war crimes may then increase.”

Some have speculated that the reduction in elected seats will greatly increase the Tatmadaw’s share of the state parliament – that is, serving military officers appointed by the commander-in-chief would still occupy 25pc of all seats, regardless of whether they were filled in an election. That would mean 12 Tatmadaw MPs to 15 elected ones. However, the constitution does not seem to support this. Section 161(d) refers to “representatives of the Region or State Hluttaw who are the Defence Services personnel nominated [to] an equal number of one-third of the total number of Hluttaw representatives [that were] elected”.

The unrepresentative state parliament that will convene after the election will only deepen an existing lack of meaningful representation in Myanmar for the Rakhine and other minority ethnic groups. Although the ANP won 22 of the 35 elected seats in the Rakhine parliament in 2015, it was prevented from forming the state government when the newly enshrined NLD president, exercising his right under the constitution, appointed a member of the NLD as chief minister – a decision that enraged Rakhine politicians and many voters.

Despite its ostensible commitment to federalism, the NLD used its majority in the Union parliament earlier this year to vote down a constitutional amendment bill that would have allowed for chief ministers to be chosen from within their state or region. This means that, even without cancellations, Rakhine voters would have had little influence over who governs their state. Meanwhile, at the national level, hopes among ethnic parties that a strong performance in the election could make them partners in a “coalition government” were always likely to founder on the winner-takes-all nature of Myanmar elections, in which the NLD does not even need a parliamentary majority to form another government.

For Rakhine seeking political autonomy and a say in how the country is governed, the mass cancellations represent yet another closed door. A decade into the “transition” to democracy, the space for ethnic minority participation is only narrowing, and the intensification and spread of armed conflict seems inevitable.

Rakhine voters have delivered two victories to Rakhine parties, in 2010 and 2015, only to see these parties denied power even within their state. The frustration this has caused is an important ingredient in the grassroots support for the Arakan Army – a group that has never been short on willing recruits. Now that most Rakhine voters are being denied a chance to vote at all, armed resistance may seem like the only door left open.

 



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