In-Depth

Myanmar’s pandemic-era election is plagued with difficulties, and the EU has made things worse 

Five years after the country held its first election to be considered free and fair in decades, tens of millions in Myanmar will go to the polls on Sunday, including up to five million first-time voters. But the campaign period this year has been plagued with difficulties. 

Election-related violence has led to injuries, destruction of property and even one death. Smaller parties have complained of having their campaign materials censored. And voting has been controversially cancelled in many townships across the country, disenfranchising 1.5m people. 

That is on top of one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and other countries, as well as about 600,000 Rohingya remaining in Myanmar, who are already barred from voting. 

Against this unstable backdrop the European Union, which is supposed to be supporting democracy in Myanmar, has instead supported a project that undermines it. 

The mVoter 2020 smartphone app, which is funded by the EU and was developed with the help of International IDEA and the Asia Foundation, lists the official “race and religion” data of election candidates. 

No one asked the candidates if they wanted this data to be shared with voters before launching the app. In Myanmar, an ethnically and religiously volatile country, such data is sensitive. Disclosing this information about the candidates risks inflaming ethnic and religious nationalism.

The app encourages voters to consider race and religion when they should be considering candidates based on their political platform, regardless of cultural background or religious belief. 

It is also complicit in erasing the Rohingya people’s identity by referring to them with the pejorative term “Bengali” to imply they are illegal migrants from Bangladesh, and failing to use their preferred ethnic name.

After one of the only two Rohingya candidates allowed to stand in the upcoming elections – Aye Win – publicly opposed the move, he was banned from running in the election. 

Although several human rights organisations have criticised the app, it has not been removed from circulation and the sensitive information has yet to be deleted. 

International IDEA has publicly claimed it had no say over the content of the app and has privately told the Union Election Commission it is withdrawing its support for the project and will no longer promote it. 

Amid a surge of new Covid-19 infections, providing voters with access to accurate information about the election has become extremely difficult. In-person campaigning is banned in large swathes of the country, and journalists have been prevented from travelling to cover election-related events. Some newspapers have been forced to stop publishing because of restrictions. Meanwhile state-owned newspapers, which naturally favour the ruling party, have been allowed to continue printing.

Travel restrictions, including a ban on most international flights, mean there will also be far fewer international election monitors than in 2015. The EU’s election observer mission, for example, has been reduced to just four members, down from the more than 100 it sent in 2015. 

International election observation is critical: Myanmar’s election process has various flaws. In the last election, people were happy to accept the result despite those flaws thanks partly to the presence of observers.  

Amid all these difficulties, institutions like the EU should be supporting initiatives that promote transparency and access to information for voters in a responsible way. The mVoter 2020 app fails to do so. The ethnic and religious data should be removed from it immediately, or else the app itself should be taken offline. 

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