bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 12–15
50,000 polling stations… as the Ambassador found out, $2 million. Yet this simple act ensured individuals could not fraudulently vote twice, adding greater legitimacy to the election results]. After my LES partner had finished voting, we stayed another half hour before beginning to make our way to Bago, a city an hour and a half away.
Just before reaching Bago, we pulled off to the side of the road along a white concrete wall. It was one of the military barracks. The government had said that all locations, even the barracks, would be open for monitors, and so we were determined to test that accessibility. After a conversation with the guard at the gate we were allowed on the compound. Our IDs were photographed and we were then ushered down a dirt road with our car. We finally pulled up to a school house where a white SUV was parked outside. Contrary to the first polling station, there was no line up here. We walked inside where two American observers had arrived five minutes before us — a testament to the sheer number of observers circulating. According to the teachers who were acting as election officials, they were only waiting for one more person to arrive for everyone on their list to have voted. It was only 10am and the station was set to stay open until 4pm. This could be a long wait. The Americans decided to try and go to a different polling station while we opted to wait a little longer. If the vote was completed, we would be able to watch vote counting. The teachers offered us tea and snacks as the minutes ticked by. Lwin Mar and I made a deal — another 20 minutes and then we would leave for another station. As luck would have it, the remaining voter arrived and our wait was not in vain.
Counting was a slow process. At that station, they had had 200 voters. It took at least three hours to count everything. The advanced national ballots, cast in the days before the elections, were the first to be tallied. Each envelope was opened, the ballot examined, shown to those watching and the name of the party selected, announced. The same process was followed for the votes which had just been cast, with all ballots for the same party placed in individual laundry baskets. The votes were counted, bundled together and the overall winner, revealed. The same process was followed for the regional votes as well as the ethnic. We sat in our plastic chairs; a soldier watched through the open window shutters.
The humidity and 30-degree heat hung heavily in the air. Once the process completed, everything was sealed in bags and loaded into the back of a pick-up truck to be taken to the regional centre in Bago. We hopped in our car and followed. The truck, containing two election officials and two security officers, drove along the highway in the hot sunshine, all the way to a small compound where the votes from the overall region were being collected.
To wrap the day, Lwin Mar and I travelled back to her polling station to observe the counting there too. People were watching through the grates that formed walls on one side of the shrine. Inside, there were observers from the public, representatives from the parties, election monitors and the election officials. Each time
Counting was a slow process. At that station, they had had 200 voters. It took at least three hours
to count everything. Each envelope was opened, the ballot examined, shown to those watching and a vote was to be rejected, it was challenged and discussed. The station had several hundred votes and the counting would go late into the night. This was to be a scene repeated across most urban areas. I headed back to the embassy to begin writing my reports. I received information from several of the other teams. One of the groups in Yangon who had gone to a station to watch the counting was being told that no one was allowed to leave until all the votes had been counted. Five hours later they finally made their way back to the embassy.
In the days following the elections, the international monitoring groups would all release their observations. Not only had election day gone smoothly, it had also gone better than anyone had even anticipated. The Union Election Committee began releasing information about vote counts at five regular times throughout the day. Once all was said and done, the opposition NLD party had won by a landslide. All sides appear to be taking the necessary steps to ensure a smooth transition of power and the start of the next chapter in Burma’s unfolding story.
What would my advice be for others taking part in election monitoring?
1. Be adaptable — The embassy actually lost all SIGNET and phone communications for a week in the lead up to the elections. The embassy staff didn’t panic though. They simply brought out the Wi-Fi hot spots.
2. Pack like you are going for a hike — You will be inside, outside, in areas with lots of amenities or no amenities at all. Be prepared for everything. Bring sun screen, bug spray, snacks, water, cell phone charger, toilet paper and anything else you think you might need.
3. It isn’t a day for bright colours — Watch what colours you wear on election day. You are meant to be non-partisan, and that means not wearing colours associated with any party running. Tan, black and white may be some of your best friends when out watching the polls.
. Footwear — Take your cues from the locals. If you are going
to be in and out of shrines, flip flops may be your footwear
of choice.
. Logistics — If you are starting early, get your logistics in
order. Can you get where you need to go in the early hours of the morning? Do you need to book a car in advance? Stay with someone in town? Similarly, what about after elections
are finished?
. Talk to strangers — Chatting with people randomly can some-
times yield interesting results. Striking up a conversation with someone sitting beside me at breakfast, I met one of the long-term election monitors of the Carter Centre. Chatting with another gentleman in the elevator, I found out he was a
camera man off to cover one of the many press conferences.
. Training can take you only so far — Some members of
the embassy participated in the training session offered by the US embassy as well as the EU monitoring mission, and subsequently trained the remainder of embassy staff. It was thorough and covered a lot of ground, but you can (and should) also trust your instincts. You have voted in elections before, you’ll know if something seems out of place.
8. Candle wax is very hot — After the votes had been tallied, the election officials were to seal the ballots into plastic bag and use candle wax to literally close and put a seal on the bags. Unfortunately, the wax was actually melting through them. A little ingenuity on the part of the teachers resulted in cloth ribbons being tied around the bags first and the wax seal being placed on that.
Jade Puddington grew up a child of a Foreign Service family. After university, she worked for DND before joining Foreign Affairs in 2010. Since then, she has worked in the International Crime and Terrorism Division, acted as a Media Liaison Officer at the G20, covered communications in the Emergency Management Bureau, and until recently was responsible for Cambodia, Burma and Laos in the Southeast Asia and Oceania Relations Division. She is currently in Mandarin language training.
It’s likely that I learned parliamentary elections would be held in Mali the same way most Malians did, through a text message inviting me to find out what my polling station was. The first message came a weck or two before the vote, and a year and a half since a coup d’état brought to an end one of Africa’s most enduring democracies. In 2012 a group of army officer had removed the previous President, Amadou Toumani Touré, on the grounds that he was failing to prevent the rapid takeover of much of the country by Tuareg rebels and Islamic militants. It didn’t take long for Mali’s erstwhile colonial rulers, the French, to appear and put an end to both the coup and the southward movement of the militants. President Touré, who was himself associated with an e arlier coup in 1991 that eventually led to democracy in Mali, did not return to power and new elections were called. In July of 2013 the presidential elections brought Mali back into the democratic fold. The Legislative Assembly vote that I observed in November of the same year was meant to close the unwelcome chapter of the country’s political history as quickly as possible, even as concerns lingered over the validity of any results that came from wide swaths of northern Mali that remained in militant hands.
A few months earlier I had just wrapped up my first posting as an immigration officer in Hong Kong, on the other side of the planet in all respects. I was now an accompanying spouse on my partner’s first posting, and experiencing the shock of suddenly having a lot of spare time. So when the call went out for election observers about a week before the vote, I quickly raised my hand.
A couple of days prior to the vote, knowing that I would be taking part, I started asking the odd Malians their opinions on the election. A friendly taxi driver seemed to sum up the sentiment of the capital, which in the end had about 30% voter turn-: out — “the parliamentary elections don’t matter, because all the power is with the president”. On the day of the vote at around 7 a.m. we set out to the first of a half-dozen schools that were doubling as voter centres we would visit that day. The first centre was empty. Once we tracked down the man in charge, who spent a few minutes digging up the bibs for the polling officers before he would talk to us, he explained that it was simply too early to see many voters. An hour later, when we arrived at the second centre, things weren’t much different.
A friendly taxi driver seemed to su which in the end had about 30% ’ elections don’t matter, because a
One of the things we had been told to look out for was voter manipulation. It was a challenging task in those first few hours as voters trickled in at a rate of about two per hour. Party representatives, on the other hand, lounged outside of stations in greater numbers than voters for most of the morning, slung across their motos in the shade of trees and school houses with no apparent interest in what was going on. The highlight of the morning came when I observed one of the party reps nonchalantly putting X’s over the names of registered voters that hung on the walls outside each station. I asked my colleague to enquire about what she was doing. “Just marking who has already voted” she responded. A good follow-up question probably would have been “why?” but following the first question she decided to stop the practice.
Even as I started to feel a little down at the low voter turnout, and the inexplicable peculiarities of the process, there were moments of real enjoyment in observing the election unfold. Posters at one station declared Femme du Mali votons massive-ment. Their presence wasn’t quite ‘massive’, but women were present as election officials, party officials, observers, and voters at
every station we visited. Shortly after taking
1m up the sentiment of the capital, voter turnout — “the parliamentary Il the power is with the president”.
a photo of one of these posters I was approached by a young Malian woman who eagerly told me about the campaign she volunteered for to encourage turnout among female voters. She explained the purpose of the campaign, the importance of participation in a democracy, and universal voter rights better than I ever could.
It was abundantly clear that the international community wanted this vote to work out. That poster extolling women to vote had the flags and logos of 17 countries and organizations on it. In the span of about thirty minutes observing one particular polling station, which was one out of about twenty at a particular school, observers from the EU, two Malian NGOs, and the United States all made appearances. It was hard to reconcile the apparent apathy of the local population with the enthusiasm of foreign powers. Where is the definitive indicator of self-determination in this sort of circumstance, and where does
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 12–15. Read the rest of this issue →
