elections in myanmar: lessons learnt from the 2015 general

Sponsored by the Programme on Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College and the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

ေအာကစဖႚဒတကၺသလ စနအနေထာနေကာလပရႀ ေခတသစမနမာေလလာေရးဌာနႎႀင ေလဒမားဂရကအေဆာငရႀ ႎငငတကာ အမးသားအမးသမးဖစမႁေလလာေရးဗဟဌာနတႚမႀ ကမကထပပၝသည။

EditorsDaw Khin Mar Mar Kyi and Matthew J Walton

တညးဖတသမား

ေဒခငမာမာကညႎႀင မကသႃး ေဂ ေဝလတန

Volume 1.1: August 2016အတၾ ၁၊ အမႀတ ၁ - ၂၀၁၆ ခႎႀစ သဂတလ

Carine Jaquet, irasec (Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia), Bangkok(ကရင ဂကက)

Elections in Myanmar: Lessons Learnt from the 2015 General Elections and Recommendationsမနမာႎငင ေရၾးေကာကပၾမား -၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ အေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾမားမႀ သငယလကရသည သငခနးစာမားႎႀင အကပခကမား

The Oxford–Myanmar Policy Brief Series(ေအာကစဖႚဒ-မနမာ) မဝၝဒေရးရာ ေရၾးခယေဆာငရၾကစရာမားႎႀင ပတသက၍ ထတေဝခကမား

Myanmar has taken another important step toward democratization, following the 2015 election victory of the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But decades of military repression, ethnic conflicts, political exclusion, abuse of natural resources and the environment, neglect of health, education, and in-frastructure, and mismanagement of the economy, have left serious challenges for this new government.

On Monday 15 February, 2016, the Programme on Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College and the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall convened a workshop entitled “Towards Democracy and Reconciliation: Challenges Facing Myanmar’s Incoming Government.” Co-organized by Dr Daw Khin Mar Mar Kyi and Dr Matthew J Walton, the workshop brought together over a dozen UK experts on Myanmar, drawn from academic, advocacy, and activist communities.

Presenters focused on the challenges facing the new NLD-led government, identifying key stakeholders, persistent and emerging impediments, and potential policy responses. Subjects considered included military legacies, governance concerns, social issues, land and resource management, and conflict and displacement.

With the success of the event, the co-organizers saw an opportunity to effectively channel the insights of the partic-ipants into policy-making conversations in Myanmar’s government, civil society, and other political institutions. They also sought to contribute to the developing public discourse on political reform in the country. Participants were asked to transform their presentations into short policy briefs that could be of use to ministries, parliament, and other de-cision-making bodies in Myanmar. The collected briefs were edited by the co-organizers and translated into Burmese.

Please note that the views and positions presented in these briefs represent the authors and are not necessarily the views of the Programme on Modern Burmese Studies, St Antony’s College, the International Gender Studies Centre, Lady Margaret Hall, or the University of Oxford. In some cases, the views of different authors may diverge or conflict. We believe that including multiple different perspectives in a collection of policy briefs is valuable in fostering public debate in Myanmar.

We intend for this to become a regular event and policy brief series, which can draw on existing expertise among those studying Myanmar, including increasing numbers of scholars and advocates from the country. These and future briefs will be available electronically at the Programme on Modern Burmese Studies website (www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-cen-tres/programme-modern-burmese-studies) and the Oxford Feminist E-Press (theoxfordfeministepress.wordpress.com/). Please feel free to contact us with any questions or feedback.

dr. daw Khin Mar Mar Kyi, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Gender Research Fellow International Gender Studies, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford [email protected], [email protected]

dr. Matthew J Walton, Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies St Antony’s College, University of Oxford [email protected]

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Oxford–Myanmar Policy Brief Series Volume 1.1: August 2016

ေဒေအာငဆနးစကည ဥးေဆာငသည အမးသားဒမကေရစအဖၾႚခပ(NLD)မႀ ၂၀၁၅ခႎႀစေရၾးေကာကပၾ အႎငရပးေနာကတၾင မနမာႎငငသည ဒမကေရစ ကငသးေရးအတၾက အေရးပၝသည ေနာကထပ ေခလႀမးတစရပ လႀမးခပၝသည။ သႚရာတၾင ဆယစႎႀစေပၝငးမားစၾာ တပမေတာ၏ဖႎႀပမႁ၊ တငးရငးသား ပဋပကၡမား၊ ႎငငေရးအရပစပယထားမႁ၊ သဘာဝသယဇာတမားႎႀင သဘာဝပတဝနးကငတႚက မေတာမတရားအသးပမႁ၊ ကနးမာေရး၊ ပညာေရးႎႀင အေခခအေဆာကအဥတႚက လစလႃရႁမႁႎႀင စးပၾားေရး စမခနႚခၾမႁ ညဖငးခငးတႚေကာင အစးရသစအတၾက ကးေလးသညအခကအခမားစၾာရႀေနပၝသည။

၂၀၁၆ခႎႀစ ေဖေဖာဝၝရလ ၁၅ရက တနလာေနႚတၾင စနအနေထာနေကာလပရႀ ေခတသစမနမာေလလာေရးဌာနႎႀင ေလဒမားဂရက အေဆာငရႀ ႎငငတကာအမးသားအမးသမး ဖစမႁေလလာေရးဗဟဌာတႚမႀ “ဒမကေရစႎႀင ပနလညသငမတေရးသႚ - မနမာႎငင၏ အသစတကလာသညအစးရမႀ ရငဆငေနရသည အခကအခမား” ေခၝငးစဥဖင လပငနးခၾငေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾတစရပ ကငးပခပၝသည။ ၄ငးေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾက ေဒၝကတာေဒခငမာမာကညႎႀင ေဒၝကတာ မကသႃး ေဂ ေဝလတနတႚမႀ ပးေပၝငးစစဥခခငး ဖစပး ယေကရႀ ပညာေရးအသငးအဝငး၊ ေထာကခ ေပာဆသမားအသငးအဝငးႎႀင တကကၾလႁပရႀားသမားအသငးအဝငး အသးသးတႚမႀ မနမာႎငငႎႀငပတသက၍ က႗မးကငသဆယႎႀစဥးေကာ တကေရာကခကပၝသည။

၄ငးေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾတၾင ပၝဝငတငဆကသမားမႀ အနအယလဒအစးရသစမႀ ရငဆငေနရသည အခကအခမားအေပ အေလးထားခပး သကေရာကမႁရႀသမား၊ စဥဆကမပတတညရႀေနေသာ အတားအဆးမားႎႀင ထၾကေပလာခၝစ အတားအဆးမား၊ မဝၝဒအရ တႚပနႎငမႁ အလားအလာမား စသညတႚက ရႀာေဖၾေဖာထတခပၝသည။ ထညသၾငးစဥးစားခသည အေကာငးအရာမားတၾင တပမေတာ၏အေမၾအႎႀစမား၊ အပခပမႁႎႀငပတသကသည ပနာမား၊ လမႁေရးအေကာငးအရာမား၊ ေမယာႎႀငအရငးအမစ စမခနႚခၾမႁ၊ ပဋပကၡႎႀင အမယာဆးရႁးမႁတႚ ပၝဝငပၝသည။

ေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾေအာငမငခသညအတၾကေကာင ပၝဝငေဆၾးေႎၾးခသမား၏ ထးထၾငးသမငမႁမားက မနမာႎငငအစးရ၊ အရပဖကလမႁ အဖၾႚအစညးႎႀင အခားေသာ ႎငငေရးအဖၾႚအစညးမားအကား မဝၝဒခမႀတခငးဆငရာ ေပာဆေဆၾးေႎၾးမႁမားအသၾငသႚ ထေရာကစၾာေပာငးလရန အခၾငအေရးတစရပအဖစ ၄ငးေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾဖစေမာကေရး ပးတၾေဆာငရၾကခသမားမႀ မငလကမပၝသည။ ထႚအပင ႎငငအတၾငးဖစေပေနသည ႎငငေရးပပငေပာငးလမႁႎႀင ပတသကသည အမားပညသေပာဆေဆၾးေႎၾးမႁတၾင ပၝဝငကညရနလညး ၄ငးတႚကးပမးခပၝသည။ ေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾ၌ တငဆကခသညမားက ဝနကးဌာနမား၊ လၿတေတာႎႀင မနမာႎငငရႀ ဆးဖတခကခသည အခားအဖၾႚအစညးမားမႀ အသးပႎငမည မဝၝဒႎႀငပတသက၍ ေရၾးခယေဆာငရၾကႎငသညအရာမားအဖစ အတခပေပာငးလေရးသားရန တငဆကသမားက ေတာငးဆခပၝသည။

ဤတငပထားခကမားမႀာ စာေရးသမား၏ သေဘာထားအမငမားသာဖစပး စနအနေထာနေကာလပရႀ ေခတသစမနမာေလလာေရး ဌာနႎႀင ေလဒမားဂရကအေဆာငရႀ ႎငငတကာအမးသားအမးသမး ဖစမႁေလလာေရး ဗဟဌာန၏ သေဘာထားအမငေသာလညးေကာငး၊ ေအာကစဖႚဒတကၺသလ၏ သေဘာထားအမငေသာလညးေကာငး မဟတေကာငးက သတပေစလပၝသည။ အခႚေနရာမားတၾင စာေရးသ တစဥးႎႀငတစဥး၏ အမငမားကၾပားခားနားခငး၊ သေဘာထားကၾလၾခငးမားရႀႎငပၝသည။ မနမာႎငငတၾင အမားပညသ အေခအတငေဆၾးေႎၾးမႁ ပးေထာငေပးရာတၾင ရႁေထာငအမးမးက ဤသႚထညသၾငး ထားေပးရနအေရးပၝသညဟ က႗ႎပတႚ ယဆပၝသည။

မနမာႎငငမႀ ပမမားပားလာသညပညာရႀငမားႎႀင ေထာကခေပာဆသမားအပၝအဝင မနမာႎငငက ေလလာေနသမားအကားရႀ လကရႀ က႗မးကငသမားထမႀ အသပညာမားဖင ဤေဆၾးေႎၾးပၾမားပမႀနကငးပပး မဝၝဒဆငရာ ေရၾးခယေဆာငရၾကစရာမား၏ အတခပထတေဝမႁမားက ပမႀနပလပသၾားရန ရညရၾယထားပၝသည။ လကရႀထတေဝမႁႎႀင ေနာငထတေဝမႁမားက ေခတသစမနမာေလလာေရးဌာန၏ ဝကဆက (www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/programme-modern-burmese-studies)ႎႀင ေအာကစဖႚ အမးသမးအခၾငအေရး လႁပရႀားသ အလကထရၾနးနစ ပႎႀပတက (theoxfordfeministepress.wordpress.com/) တႚမႀ အလကထရၾနးနစနညးဖင ရယႎငပၝသည။ ေမးစရာရႀပၝက သႚမဟတ တႚပနေပာဆခကမားရႀပၝက က႗ႎပတႚက ဆကသၾယရန ဝနမေလးပၝႎႀင။

ေဒၝကတာ ေဒခငမာမာကည၊ အမးသားအမးသမးဖစမႁေလလာေရး ေဒေအာငဆနးစကည သေတသဆရႀင ႎငငတကာ အမးသားအမးသမးဖစမႁေလလာေရးဌာန၊ ေလဒမားဂရကအေဆာင၊ ေအာကစဖႚဒတကၺသလ [email protected], [email protected]

ေဒၝကတာ မကသႃး ေဂ ေဝလတန၊ ေခတသစမနမာေလလာေရး ေဒေအာငဆနးစကည အဆငမငသေတသဆရႀင စနအနေထာနေကာလပ၊ ေအာကစဖႚဒတကၺသလ [email protected]

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Oxford–Myanmar Policy Brief Series Volume 1.1: August 2016

The 2015 General Elections were a test for the political transition in Myanmar as they marked a significant turn from the remnants of a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy. In contrast to the 2010 General Elections, where only 39 parties were allowed to participate, in 2015 more than 90 parties and 6,000 can-didates participated. The campaign was overall free, with some concerns due to the spread of radical nationalist Buddhist messages, and discriminatory speech, es-pecially on social media. On the Election Day itself, the turn-out was significant, with the Union Election Commission (UEC) reporting that around 69%, or 23 million Myanmar citizens cast their votes in about 41,000 polling stations.

These elections, based on a first-past-the post system, turned out—like those of the 1990 Assembly—to be a plebiscite for change; over 80% of the contested seats of all chambers were won by the National League for Democracy. With a newly formed government, the rul-ing party can now consider reviewing the electoral poli-cies and frameworks, based on the lessons learnt in the 2015 elections.

Main Lessons learnt from the 2015 General Elections

On Election Day, the voting process in polling stations was reported overall as peaceful and well-organised. The secrecy of the ballot was respected. For the first time, approximatively 11,000 domestic and 1,000 interna-tional observers were officially accredited1 and allowed to observe the electoral process without any hindrance. Despite the UEC’s obvious efforts to administer the pro-cess smoothly, procedurally some inconsistent practices and anomalies persisted. A number of challenges related to the legal framework and existing practices are listed below:

Right to vote

1 [http://www.idea.int/asia_pacific/myanmar/myanmar-election-observers-witness-large-voter-turnout.cfm] accessed on 19.04.2016.

The cancellation of temporary citizenship registration certificates and a stalled citizenship verification process resulted in large-scale disenfranchisement of voters.

Former temporary citizenship card holders had their entitlements to vote and to belong to political parties taken away. As a result, more than 1 million stateless persons in Myanmar could not cast their ballots. The vast majority of those disenfranchised represented the Rohingya community, but the group also included mi-nority ethnic nationalities and Internally Displaced Persons in conflict affected-areas, as well as some of Indian, Chinese and Nepali descent.

Right to standEligibility criteria for candidates include having resid-

ed in the country for at least 10 consecutive years, being an eligible voter, and having parents that are citizens of Myanmar. As a consequence, associate and naturalized citizens were disqualified from running for office.

Candidate nominations were submitted to the UEC, with no legal guidance on required documentation to de-termine eligibility. There was also no requirement that UEC decisions be issued in writing nor any legal justifi-cation for the decisions. Appeal is possible but the UEC ultimately rules on the matter.

Voter list accuracyThe UEC made intensive efforts to update the voter

list and digitize it. Nonetheless, the (perception of) ac-curacy of the voter list was problematic. The list is based on General Administrative Department and Ministry of Immigration and Population household lists and log-books, some of which are neither accurately recorded nor regularly updated. This passive registration system cre-ates a burden for voters, and many, especially in remote areas, are not familiar with the procedures to verify and correct their details on the list.

Nonetheless, surprisingly no major issue was reported on the Election Day and international observers report-ed that voter list issues were witnessed in only 7% of the visited polling stations.2

Advance votingFollowing serious allegations of fraud in the 2010

General Elections, advance voting is a particularly sen-sitive matter. Yet, observation of out-of-constituency advance voting (including in military cantonments and in embassies overseas) was refused, and this remained a completely opaque process.

2 European Union Election Observation Mission, Myanmar General Elections 2015, Final Report, March 2016.

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Volume 1.1: August 2016Oxford–Myanmar Policy Brief Series

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Independence and composition of the UECAccording to Article 398 of the 2008 Constitution, the

Chairman of the UEC and another four members are ap-pointed by the president. Due to the public perception of the bias of government institutions, this institution has been regarded with great suspicion by a significant proportion of the voters.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the UEC has made tremendous preparations to organize the most credible and competitive national elections in the country for the last 25 years.

MalapportionmentAs for the Constitution and Election Laws, the Lower

House constituencies are based on townships, and in the Upper House, each Region and State is given the same number of representatives regardless of population. As the population is unevenly dispersed on the territory, this leads to great inequalities in terms of the weight of a given vote. As a consequence, in the Lower House, for example, one Member of Parliament (MP) represents 155,000 constituents in the Irrawaddy Region, against only 24,000 constituents in Kayah State.

Women’s participation Women remain significantly underrepresented in of-

fice, within the UEC at sub-national and national levels and also among the candidates and the MPs.

About 13% of the candidates and 12.5% of the elected MPs were women. Although this is a relatively low rate, it is a meaningful increase compared to the former leg-islatures which included only 4.6% of women as elected MPs. Some regions are still lagging behind as no female representative was elected in the Chin, Kayah or Rakhine State Parliaments.

Voter educationBecause of the recent political history of Myanmar—

marked by the absence of genuine elections for dec-ades—civic and voter education remained a black hole for a large proportion of the voters. In the wake of the 2015 Elections, innovative efforts have been carried out— mostly by civil society organisations - to dissemi-nate information. However, outreach remains especially challenging in remote areas.

Key Recommendations

To the Parliament: y Right to vote and Right to stand: Connected

to, but not solely related to the elections, a reform of the 1982 Citizenship Law could ensure that persons

reasonably qualified for citizenship are able to secure cit-izenship (in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ prohibition on racial and religious dis-crimination) and therefore be entitled to stand for elec-tions and vote.

y Electing MPs: Ultimately, all MPs should be elect-ed by the citizens. The articles of the Constitution re-serving seats to military nominees (articles 74, 109 and 141) should be amended to allow a fully-fledged parlia-mentary democracy.

A shift from the majority first-past-the-post to a pro-portional representation system could be considered in the future. Numerous political parties competed in the elections without winning any seat, although they col-lected appreciable amounts of votes. As Myanmar is an extremely diverse country, this reform would enable greater inclusiveness within the legislatures.

y Independence of the UEC: The current legal framework should be amended to guarantee the required political neutrality of this institution, whose chairman and members should not be appointed by the govern-ment. Instead it should be an independent body, without any ties to the governing party or its members.

y Malapportionment: The legal framework should seek to ensure that the boundaries of electoral units are drawn in such a way as to accord equal weight to each vote to the greatest degree possible to ensure effective representation.

To the UEC: y Voter list: Consider an alternative registration

process, not based on the household lists. In addition, expand voter education efforts to ensure that more vot-ers understand the update process and aspects such as voter transfer for voters in temporary residence. Finally, promote user-friendly tools to check and update the list.

y Advance voting: Processes should be more trans-parent, with the following suggested measures:

� Clarify the criteria to entitle voters for advance voting

� Display hard copies of the advanced voter list near the polling stations (as is done for regular voters)

� Authorize domestic and international observers to monitor all stages

y Strengthen the capacity of members and staff across the country: The UEC should pursue efforts to-wards transparency with adequate staffing and training at State and Region, District, Township and Village Track levels so as to ensure that the guidelines are fully under-stood and systematically implemented.


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y Building trust: Additional communication and stakeholder engagement efforts are needed to foster a greater trust of the voters in the institution.

To all electoral stakeholders: y Women’s participation: Reformed laws should in-

clude requirements that political parties promote wom-en’s participation, by including a quota, or a reasonable number as candidates, among other options. Measures could also be enacted to encourage the participation of women in political life, promoting their integration into mainstream political party structures and develop-ing their capacity as candidates. Beyond quotas, a wide range of measures could be considered, such as the for-mation of women’s Caucuses or the creation of a Gender Equality Commission within the Parliament. In case of electoral system reform, proportional representation would allow female candidates to be inserted among the first candidates of the lists, making them more likely to secure seats. Public education curriculum could also in-clude elements of gender studies to increase the popula-tion’s awareness about existing inequalities.

y Voter education: Sustain voter education as well as civic education efforts with tailored approaches to max-imize outreach (for example, ensure that documents are available in main ethnic languages). Consider integrating these components into the primary and secondary edu-cation curriculum to equip citizens with basic knowledge to know their rights. Ultimately, this will enable them to better understand their rights and their political institu-tions, helping them to make informed political decisions.

Carine Jaquet is an Associate Researcher at the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) in Bangkok. She holds a politi-cal Science MA from La Sorbonne University, a degree of Burmese Language from the Yangon University of Foreign Languages (YUFL). She has extensively collaborated with the Union Election Commission of Myanmar, in capacity of Senior Technical Advisor for the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).


၂၀၁၅ခႎႀစ အေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾမားသည တပမေတာအာဏာရႀငစနစ၏ အကၾငးအကနမားမႀ ပၝလမနဒမကေရစအဖစသႚ အထးအေရးပၝသည ေပာငးလမႁဖစသညအတၾက မနမာႎငင၏ ႎငငေရး အသၾငကးေပာငးေရးအတၾက စမးသပခကတစရပဖစပၝသည။ ပၝတ ၃၉ရပသာပၝဝငခၾငရခသည ၂၀၁၀ အေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾမားႎႀင ကၾာခားစၾာ ၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစတၾင ပၝတ ၉၀ေကာႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငသ ၆၀၀၀ ပၝဝငခပၝသည။ စညးရးေရးဆငးသညအခၝ ေယဘယအားဖင လၾတလပမႁရႀခပး အစၾနးေရာက မးခစစတႎႀင ဗဒၭဘာသာဆငရာ ေပာဆခကမားႎႀင ခၾခားဆကဆသညေပာဆမႁမားမႀာ အထးသဖင လမႁေရးမဒယာမားတၾင ပႚႎႀႚခခငးေကာင စးရမစရာအခႚရႀခပၝသည။ ေရၾးေကာကပၾေနႚတၾငမ လာေရာကမေပးသအေရအတၾကမႀာ ထးခားစၾာမားပားခပး မနမာႎငငသား ၆၉% သႚမဟတ ၂၃ သနးမႀ မရ ၄၁၀၀၀ ခနႚတၾငမေပးခေကာငး ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀင (UEC) မႀ အစရငခခပၝသည။

မမားသအႎငရသညစနစေပတၾငအေခခသည ၄ငးေရၾးေကာကပၾမားမႀာ ၁၉၉၀ အေထၾေထၾညလာခတၾငကသႚ အေပာငးအလအတၾက လထဆႎၬခယပၾတစရပ ဖစခပၝသည။ လၿတေတာအားလးတၾင ယႀဥပငသညေနရာ ၈၀% ေကာက အမးသားဒမကေရစ အဖၾႚခပမႀ အႎငရရႀခပၝသည။ ၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ ေရၾးေကာကပၾမားမႀ ရရႀခသညသငခနးစာမားအေပအေခခ၍ အာဏာရအပခပသပၝတမႀ အသစဖၾႚစညးထားသညအစးရဖင ယခအခၝ ေရၾးေကာကပၾဆငရာမဝၝဒမားႎႀင လပငနးစဥမားကသးသပရန ေတၾးေတာႎငပၝသည။

၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ အေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾမားမႀ သငယလကရသည အဓက သငခနးစာမား

ေရၾးေကာကပၾေနႚတၾင မရမားရႀမေပးသညလပငနးစဥမားမႀာ ေယဘယအားဖငေအးခမးပး စနစတကရႀေကာငးသရပၝသည။ မမားက လ႖ႚဝႀကထားရမညဆသညအခကအေပ ေလးစားခကပၝသည။ ပထမဥးဆးအေနဖင ပညတၾငးမႀေလလာသ ၁၁၀၀၀ ခနႚႎႀင ႎငငတကာမႀေလလာသ ၁၀၀၀ တႚက တရားဝငလကခခပး1 ေရၾးေကာကပၾလပငနးစဥက အတားအဆးမရႀ ေလလာခၾငပခပၝသည။ ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငမႀ လပငနးစဥေခာေမၾႚေရးအတၾက ကးပမးခသညမႀာ ထငရႀားေသာလညး လပထးလပနညးမား ကၾလၾမႁႎႀငမမမႀနမႁမား ရႀမရႀခပၝသည။ ဥပေဒေရးရာ လပငနးစဥႎႀင လကရႀကငစဥမားတႚႎႀငသကဆငသည အခကအခအခႚက ေအာကတၾငေဖာပထားပၝသည -

မေပးပငခၾင ယာယႎငငသားမႀတပတငလကမႀတမားဖကသမးခငးႎႀင ႎငငသားအတညပသညလပငနးစဥ ရပတနႚသၾားခငးေကာင ေမာကမားစၾာေသာ

မဆႎၬရႀငမား မေပးခၾငရပသမးခခရပၝသည။2 ယခငယာယႎငငသားကတပားကငေဆာငသမားတၾင ရႀခသညမေပးပငခၾငႎႀင ႎငငေရးပၝတဝငဖစပငခၾငမား ရပသမးခခရပၝသည။ ထႚေကာင

မနမာႎငငတၾင တငးပညမဖစေနသတစသနးေကာမႀာ မေပးႎငခခငးမရႀပၝ။ မေပးခၾငရပသမးခရသအမားစမႀာ ရဟငဂာအသငးအဝငး မႀဖစေသာလညး တငးရငးသားလနညးစမား၊ ပဋပကၡေဒသမားမႀ ပညတၾငးအးအမမႀေရၿႚေပာငးခရသမား၊ အႎၬယ၊ တရပႎႀင နေပၝလမးတႚမႀ ဆငးသကလာသအခႚတႚလညး ပၝဝငပၝသည။

ေရၾးေကာကပၾတၾင အေရၾးခပငခၾင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငသမားအတၾက သတမႀတထားသညအရညအခငးမားတၾင အနညးဆး ၁၀ႎႀစ ဆကတက ႎငငအတၾငးေနထငပးခငး၊

မေပးပငခၾငရႀသဖစခငးႎႀင မနမာႎငငသား မဘမားရႀခငးတႚ ပၝဝငပၝသည။ ထႚေကာင အကးဆကအေနဖင တၾဖကႎငငသားႎႀင ႎငငသားအဖစ ခယသမားမႀာ ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငရန အရညအခငးမမ ဖစသၾားခပၝသည။

ေရၾးေကာကပၾအတၾက အရညအခငးမမမ ဆးဖတရနသတမႀတထားသည အေထာကအထားမားအတၾက ဥပေဒလမးညၿနခကမရႀဘ ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငမညသမား၏ အမညစာရငးက ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငထ တငသၾငးခကပၝသည။ ပညေထာငစ ေရၾးေကာကပၾ ေကာမရႀငမႀ ဆးဖတခကမားက ေရးသားထတပနရန၊ ဆးဖတခကမားအတၾက ဥပေဒအရ ကးေကာငးပခကမား ေပးရန သတမႀတခကမားလညး မရႀပၝ။ အယခဝငႎငေသာလညး အဆးတၾင ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငမႀသာ ဤကစၤအေပ ဆးဖတပၝသည။

မေပးသမားစာရငး တကမႀနကနမႁ ေနာကဆးမေပးသ စာရငးထတပနရနႎႀင မစာရငးကကၾနပႃတာဖငအသးပႎငေရးလပေဆာငရန ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငမႀ

အပငးအထနကးပမးခပၝသည။ သႚရာတၾင မေပးသစာရငးတကမႀနကနမႁ (အေပသမငမႁ)မႀာ ပနာရႀပၝသည။ ၄ငးစာရငးက အေထၾေထၾ အပခပေရးဥးစးဌာနႎႀင လဝငမႁကးကပေရးႎႀင လဥးေရဝနကးဌာန၏ အမေထာငစစာရငးမားႎႀင မႀတတမးစာအပမားအေပအေခခထားပး စာရငးႎႀင မႀတတမးအခႚမႀာ တကမႀနကနမႁလညးမရႀ ပမႀနအသစေရးဆၾထားခငးလညးမရႀပၝ။ လႁပရႀားမႁမရႀေသာ ထမႀတပတငစနစမႀာ

1 [http://www.idea.int/asia_pacific/myanmar/myanmar-election-observers-witness-large-voter-turnout.cfm] ၁၉ ၀၄ ၂၀၁၆ တၾင အခကအလက ရယခခငးဖစပၝသည။2 ၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ ဇၾနလ ၂၅ ရကတၾင စတတၪအကမ ပငဆငခသည အမးသားလၿတေတာေရၾးေကာကပၾ နညးဥပေဒမား ၄/၂၀၁၅။

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မေပးသမားအတၾက ဝနထပဝနပးတစရပဖစပး အထးသဖငေဝးလေသာေဒသမားရႀ မေပးသအမားအပားမႀာ စာရငးတၾငေဖာပထားသည ၄ငးတႚ၏ အေသးစတအခကအလကမားက မႀနမမႀနစစေဆးရနႎႀင အမႀားပငရန လပငနးစဥႎႀင အက႗မးတဝငမရႀပၝ။

သႚရာတၾင ေရၾးေကာကပၾေနႚတၾင ပနာကးကးမားမားရႀေကာငး အစရငခထားခငးမရႀသညမႀာ အသဖၾယေကာငးပး ႎငငတကာ ေလလာသမားမႀ မေပးသစာရငးပနာမားက ၄ငးတႚသၾားေရာကခသည မရ ၇% တၾငသာေတၾႚခေကာငး ေပာကားခပၝသည။3

ကတငမေပးခငး ၂၀၁၀ ခႎႀစအေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾတၾင လမလညမႁဆငရာ ကးေလးသညစၾပစၾခကမားေပထၾကလာပးေနာက ကတငမေပးခငးမႀာ

အထးထခကလၾယေသာ အေကာငးအရာတစရပ ဖစပၝသည။ သႚရာတၾင (တပေမမားႎႀင ပညပသရးမားတၾင အပၝအဝင) မဆႎၬနယ ပငပေရာကေနသမားအတၾက ကတငမေပးမႁအေပ ေလလာခၾငမပခသဖင ဤသညမႀာ လးဝထးထၾငးမငသာခငးမရႀသည လပငနးစဥ ဖစခပၝသည။

ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀင သးခားရပတညမႁႎႀင ဖၾႚစညးတညေဆာကပ၂၀၀၈ ခႎႀစဖၾႚစညးပအေခခဥပေဒ ပဒမ ၃၉၈ အရ ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငဥကၺႉႎႀင ေနာကထပအဖၾႚဝငေလးဥးတႚက သမတမႀ

ခနႚအပပၝသည။ အစးရအဖၾႚအစညးမား ဘကလကသညဟေသာ ပညသတႚ၏ထငမငခကေကာင မေပးသ အမားအပားက ဤအဖၾႚအစညးအေပ သသယကးမားေနပၝသည။

သႚရာတၾင ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငမႀ လၾနခသည ၂၅ႎႀစအတၾငး ႎငငအတၾငး ယကညစတခရဆးဖစပး ယႀဥပငမႁ အမငမားဆးဖစသည ႎငငေတာေရၾးေကာကပၾမားစစဥရန ကးမားေသာပငဆငမႁမားေဆာငရၾကခသညမႀာ မႀတသားထကပၝသည။

အခးအစားမညမ႖ခငး ဖၾႚစညးပဥပေဒႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဆငရာဥပေဒမားအတၾကမ ေအာကလၿတေတာမဆႎၬနယမားက မႚနယမားတၾငအေခခထားပး

အထကလၿတေတာတၾင ေဒသကးႎႀငတငးတစခစအတၾက လဥးေရမညမ႖ပငရႀသညဖစေစ တညသညကယစားလႀယ အေရအတၾက ေပးထားပၝသည။ နယေမတၾင လဥးေရမႀာ မညမမ႖ပႚႎႀေနသညအတၾက ဤသႚဖစေနခငးေကာင မတစခ၏တနဖးမႀာ ကးမားစၾာမညမမ႖ ကၾာခားေနပၝသည။ အကးဆကအဖစ ဥပမာ ေအာကလၿတေတာတၾင ဧရာဝတေဒသကး၌ လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယတစဥးမႀာ မဆႎၬရႀင ၁၅၅၀၀၀ အတၾက ကယစားပပး ကယားပညနယတၾင ၂၄၀၀၀ ကသာ ကယစားပပၝသည။

အမးသမးမား၏ပၝဝငမႁ အစးရအဖၾႚ၊ ႎငငေတာအဆငေအာကႎႀင ႎငငေတာအဆငရႀ ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငအတၾငး၊ ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငသမား အကားႎႀင

လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယမားအကားတၾင အမးသမးမားအတၾကကယစားပမႁ အလၾနနညးပၝလ႖က ရႀေနပၝသည။ ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငသ ၁၃% ခနႚႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကခရသည လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယ ၁၂.၅% တႚမႀာ အမးသမးမားဖစကပၝသည။

ႎႁနးထားနမေသာလညး ေရၾးေကာကခရသည လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယ ၄.၆% သာရႀသည ယခငလၿတေတာမားႎႀငစာလ႖င ဤသညမႀာ ကးမားေသာတးတကမႁဖစပၝသည။ ခငး၊ ကယား သႚမဟတ ရခငပညနယလၿတေတာမားတၾင အမးသမးကယစားလႀယ တစဥးမ႖ ေရၾးေကာက ခရခငးမရႀသညအတၾက အခႚေဒသမားမႀာ ေနာကကကနေနဆဖစပၝသည။

မေပးသ ပညာေပး ဆယစႎႀစေပၝငးမားစၾာ စစမႀနသညေရၾးေကာကပၾမားကငးမမႁဖငထငရႀားသည မားမကာမက မနမာႎငငႎငငေရးသမငးေကာင မေပးသ

အမားအပားမႀာ ႎငငသားမားႎႀငဆငေသာပညာေရးႎႀင မေပးသပညာေရး လးဝကငးမေနပၝသည။ ၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ ေရၾးေကာကပၾမားပးခၝစတၾင မားေသာအားဖင အရပဖကလမႁအသငးအဝငးအဖၾႚအစညးမားမႀ သတငးအခကအလကမား ဖနႚဖႃးေရးအတၾက ဆနးသစသည ကးပမးခကမား ေဆာငရၾကခပၝသည။ သႚရာတၾင ေဝးလေသာအရပေဒသမားအတၾက ကမးလင ေထာကကခငးမားမႀာ အထးခကခေနဆဖစပၝသည။

အဓကအကပခကမား

လၿတေတာသႚ - y မေပးပငခၾငႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငပငခၾင - ေရၾးေကာကပၾမားႎႀင ခတဆကေနေသာလညး လးဝဥဆကစပေနသည မဟတေသာ

၁၉၈၂ခႎႀစ ႎငငသားဥပေဒက ပပငေပာငးလပၝက ႎငငသားဖစရနထကသငေသာ အရညအခငးရႀသမား အေနဖင (ႎငငတကာ လႚအခၾငအေရးေကညာစာတမး၏ လမးေရးအရႎႀငဘာသာေရးအရ ခၾခားဆကဆမႁအေပ တားမစခကႎႀငအည) ႎငငသားခယႎငမညဖစပး ထႚအတၾကေကာင ေရၾးေကာကပၾတၾင ဝငေရာကအေရၾးခႎငပး မေပးႎငပၝမည။

y လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယမား ေရၾးေကာကခငး - အဆးတၾင လၿတေတာကယစားလႀယအားလးက ႎငငသားမားမႀ ေရၾးေကာကရမညဖစပၝသည။ တပမေတာမႀ အမညတငသၾငးသမားအတၾက ေနရာဖယထားေပးသည ဖၾႚစညးပအေခခဥပေဒ ပဒမမား (ပဒမ ၇၄၊ ၁၀၉ ႎႀင ၁၄၁) တႚက လးဝတးတကသည ပၝလမနဒမကေရစစနစေပထၾနးေရးအတၾက ပငဆငရပၝမည။

3 ဥေရာပသမဂၢ ေရၾးေကာကပၾေလလာေရးအဖၾႚ၊ ၂၀၁၅ ခႎႀစ မနမာႎငင အေထၾေထၾေရၾးေကာကပၾမား၊ ေနာကဆးအစရငခစာ၊ ၂၀၁၆ ခႎႀစ မတလ။


9

မမားသအႎငရရႀသညစနစမႀ အခးကကယစားပသညစနစသႚေပာငးလရန အနာဂတတၾင ထညသၾငးစဥးစားႎငပၝသည။ ေရၾးေကာကပၾတၾင ဝငေရာကယႀဥပငခသည ႎငငေရးပၝတအမားအပားမႀာ မအေတာမားမားရရႀခေသာလညး ေနရာတစေနရာမ႖မရခပၝ။ မနမာႎငငသည အလၾနပငကၾပားသည ႎငငဖစသညအတၾက ဤသႚပပငေပာငးလခငးဖင လၿတေတာမားအတၾငး ပမပၝဝငမႁရႀေစပၝမည။

y ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀင၏ သးခားရပတညမႁ - ဤအဖၾႚအစညးအတၾကလအပသည ႎငငေရးဘကမလကမႁ အာမခႎငေရးအတၾက လကရႀဥပေဒလပငနးစဥက ေပာငးလရမညဖစပး ဤအဖၾႚအစညး၏ ဥကၺႉႎႀင အဖၾႚဝငမားက အစးရမႀ ခနႚအပခငး မပရပၝ။ ၄ငးသညသးခားရပတညသည အဖၾႚအစညးဖစရမညဖစပး အပခပေနသည ပၝတႎႀင ေသာလညးေကာငး၊ အဖၾႚဝငမားႎႀငေသာလညးေကာငး ဆကစပေနခငးမရႀရပၝ။

y အခးအစားမညမ႖ခငး - ထေရာကသညကယစားပမႁရႀေစေရးအတၾက မတစခစတၾင တတႎငသမ႖ တညသညတနဖးရႀရန ေရၾးေကာကပၾႎႀင ဆငေသာ နယေမသတမႀတခကမားက ေရးဆၾထာေကာငးေသခာရန ဥပေဒလပငနးစဥမႀ ေဆာငရၾကရပၝမည။

ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငသႚ - y မေပးသစာရငး - အမေထာငစစာရငးမားအေပအေခခထားခငးမဟတသည မစာရငးမႀတပတငသည အခားနညးတစရပ စဥးစားပၝ။

၄ငးအပင ယာယေနထငရာအရပတၾငရႀေနသည မေပးသမားအတၾက ေနာကဆးအခကအလကမား အစရငခသညလပငနးစဥႎႀင မေပးသ လၿေပာငးခငးကသႚ ကၸမားက ပမမားပားသညမေပးသတႚမႀ နားလညေကာငး ေသခာရန မေပးသပညာေပး ကးပမးခကမားက တးခႚပၝ။ ေနာကဆးအေနဖင မေပးသစာရငးစစေဆးရနႎႀင ေနာကဆး အခကအလကမား အေကာငးကားရနအတၾက အသးပရနလၾယကသည ကရယာမားသးပၝ။

y ကတငမေပးခငး - ေအာကပၝအကပထားသညေဆာငရၾကခကမားဖင လပငနးစဥမား ပမထးထၾငးမငသာမႁ ရႀရပၝမည - � ကတငမေပးခၾငရရန မေပးသမားက သတမႀတခကမား ရႀငးပပၝ � မရမားအနးတၾင ကတငမေပးသစာရငးစာရၾကမားက (သာမနမေပးသမားအတၾက လပသညအတငး) ပသထားပၝ � ပညတၾငးပညပေလလာသမားက အဆငတငးတၾငေစာငကပကညရႁခၾင ပပၝ

y ႎငငတစဝနးလးရႀ အဖၾႚဝငမားႎႀငဝနထမးမား၏ စၾမးေဆာငရညက ခငမာပၝေစ - လမးညၿနခကမားက အပညအဝ နားလညပး စနစတက အေကာငအထညေဖာမႁရႀေကာငး ေသခာရန ပညနယႎႀငတငးေဒသကး၊ ခရင၊ မႚနယႎႀင ေကးရၾာအပစအဆငမားတၾင ထးထၾငးမငသာမႁ ရႀေရးက လေလာကသညဝနထမးဥးေရႎႀင လေလာကသည သငတနးတႚဖင ပညေထာငစ ေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမတမႀ ကးပမးရပၝမည။

y ယကညမႁတညေဆာကခငး - အဖၾႚအစညးအတၾငးရႀမေပးသမားတၾင ပမစတခယကညမႁေမၾးမႃေရးအတၾက ေပာဆဆကသၾယေရးႎႀင အကးသကေရာကသမား၏ ပၝဝငမႁအတၾကကးပမးခကမား ထပမလအပပၝသည။

မေပးမႁႎႀငပတသက၍ အကးသကေရာကမႁရႀသအားလးသႚ y အမးသမးမား၏ပၝဝငမႁ - ပပငေပာငးလထားသည ဥပေဒမားတၾင ႎငငေရးပၝတမားမႀ အမးသမးမားပၝဝငမႁက အားေပးရန သတမႀတခကမား

ထညသၾငးရပၝမည။ ဤအတၾက အခားလပကငႎငသညအရာမားအပင ဥးေရကနႚသတခက၊ သငေတာသည ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငပမာဏ စသညတႚကထညသၾငးရပၝမည။ ႎငငေရးပၝတဖၾႚစညးပမားတၾင အမးသမးမား ပၝဝငမႁက အားေပးခငးႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဝငသမားအဖစ ၄ငးတႚ၏စၾမးရည မႀငတငေပးခငးတႚဖင အမးသမးမား ႎငငေရးဘဝတၾငပၝဝငမႁက အားေပးရန ေဆာငရၾကခကမားလညး ပလပႎငပၝသည။ ဥးေရကနႚသတခကအပင ႎငငေရးပၝတ၏ ဆးဖတစမပငခၾငရႀသည အမးသမးေကာမတမား ဖၾႚစညးခငး သႚမဟတ လၿတေတာအတၾငး အမးသားအမးသမး တနးတမႁရႀသည ေကာမရႀငဖနတးခငးကသႚ ေဆာငရၾကခကအမးမး စဥးစားႎငပၝသည။ ေရၾးေကာကပၾစနစ ပပင ေပာငးလရာတၾင အခးကကယစားပမႁရႀပၝက ေရၾးေကာကခအမးသမးမားက စာရငးမားရႀ ပထမဆး ေရၾးေကာကခသမား အကား ထညသၾငးႎငမညဖစပး ၄ငးတႚအေနဖင ေနရာရရနအလားအလာ ပမားပၝသည။ လကရႀ မညမ႖မႁမားအေကာငး လထအေနဖငပမသရႀေရးအတၾက ပညသႚ ပညာေပး သငရးညၿနးတမးတၾငလညး အမးသမးအမးသားဖစမႁ ေလလာခကမား ထညသၾငးႎငပၝသည။

y မေပးသ ပညာေပး - ကမးလငေထာကကမႁအမငမားဆးဖစေစရန မေပးသမားပညာေပးက ေရရႀညေဆာငရၾကပး (ဥပမာ အဓက တငးရငးဘာသာစကားမားဖင စာရၾကစာတမးမားရရႀေစခငးကသႚ) အဝငခၾငကစမထားသည ခဥးကပနညးမားဖင အရပဖကပညာေပးကးပမးမႁမား ပလပပၝ။ ႎငငသားမား ၄ငးတႚ၏ရပငခၾငမား သရႀေရးအတၾက အေခခအသပညာေပးရန ၄ငးအစတအပငးမားက မလတနး၊ အလယတနး၊ အထကတနး ပညာေရးသငရးညၿနးတမးမားတၾင ထညသၾငးရန စဥးစားပၝ။ အဆးတၾင ဤသႚပခငးဖင ၄ငးတႚသည ရပငခၾငမားႎႀင ၄ငးတႚ၏ ႎငငေရးအဖၾႚအစညးမားက ပမနားလညပး အခကအလကမားသလ႖က ႎငငေရးဆးဖတခကမား ခမႀတရာတၾင အေထာကအကပပၝမည။

ကရင ဂကကသည ဘနေကာကမႚ (မကေမႀာကေခတ အေရႀႚေတာငအာရႀ သေတသနတကၺသလ) Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) တၾင တၾဖကသေတသတစဥး ဖစပၝသည။ လာစးေဘာန တကၺသလမႀ ႎငငေရးသပၯ မဟာဝဇၦာဘၾႚ၊ ရနကနႎငငခားဘာသာသငသပၯ (YUFL) မႀ မနမာဘာသာဘၾႚတႚ ရရႀထားသဖစပၝသည။ (ဒမကေရစႎႀင ေရၾးေကာကပၾဆငရာ ပပးမႁသပၯ) Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) အတၾက နညးပညာအကေပး ပဂၢလအဖစ မနမာႎငင ပညေထာငစေရၾးေကာကပၾေကာမရႀငႎႀင ပးေပၝငးေဆာငရၾကမႁ မားစၾာပလပခပၝသည။


elections in myanmar: lessons learnt from the 2015 general

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