The high-stakes vote in Pyin Oo Lwin threw up a number of controversies yesterday, including disappearing voter ID cards, disenfranchised voters and media lockouts at one major polling station.

The key battle in the township is between Mandalay Region Chief Minister U Ye Myint, a Union Solidarity and Development Party candidate who is competing for a regional parliament seat with U Khin Maung Htay of the National League for Democracy.

The Mandalay Region township can fairly be described as a stronghold of the military, with about 20,000 of its voters being members of the Tatmadaw or the police.

Opposition figures in the township were yesterday crying foul over the high number of advance votes cast, saying the rules may have been broken. At one point, some ward-level election commission offices closed temporarily when they ran out of envelopes in which advance votes must be sealed.

In some wards in the Mandalay Region constituency, advance votes were not placed in envelopes, as procedure requires, because of the shortage, said NLD regional hluttaw candidate for Pyin Oo Lwin U Aung Min. In some cases, reportedly, envelopes containing advance votes were not sealed.

The ward commission office in Zee Pin Gyi village and others closed temporarily.

“How many advance votes did they accept? They are not supposed to allow advance voting without sufficient reason. Advance votes should be given only to people who cannot come to the polling station on election day because they are sick or travelling. But hundreds of advance votes have been allowed in every office,” he said on November 7.

About 50 envelopes for advance votes were allocated to each office, said township election director U Myo Aung. “We sent out more envelopes to offices that reported running out,” he said.

About 582 people were listed as advance voters in the township.

Meanwhile, a significant number of people were reportedly left off the electoral roll, with some villages almost missing out entirely.

Only four among the roughly 100 people in Aung Chantha village have been registered to vote with the aid of the village election committee.

About 70 percent of the people in Aung Chantha village are guest residents, living outside their regular place of domicile.

About 130 names, including both villagers and guest residents, from Anee Sakhan village in Pyin Oo Lwin are missing from the voter list, residents reported.

As voting draw to a close, journalists were locked out of the counting process at a polling station in central Pyin Oo Lwin. The poll officer gave no reason for refusing to let them watch the count in polling station 1 in the town’s No 3 ward. The station is inside a middle school.

Journalists asked teachers waiting at the gate to request the poll officer to let them in, but negotiations with the poll officer failed.

Early in the day, electoral officials played down fears surrounding the disappearance of a packet of blank voter ID cards, saying they were probably just “misplaced”.

U Myo Aung, chair of the township election commission, said nobody would be able to vote twice even if they had somehow acquired a spare identity card, since each card bore a unique serial number.

“This won’t change the voting. There are serial numbers on those IDs, so no one can vote twice. They were probably just misplaced,” he said.

U Aung Min, NLD candidate for the constituency’s regional hluttaw seat, said, “The disappearance of the ID cards brings the election into question.”

Other observers have noted errors and double entries on some ID cards.

Translation by Thiri Min Htun