A spokesperson from the junta-controlled Union Election Commission (UEC), Tin Maung Oo, said at a military press conference in Naypyidaw on May 20 that the commission has so far identified around 1,000 cases of election fraud during the 2020 general elections.
The UEC, whose leaders were purged directly after the coup to be replaced by pro-military managers, was Burma’s election monitor during the 2020 elections.
In the days directly after the Feb. 2021 coup, a petulant Min Aung Hlaing had claimed that the military would prove 10.5 million examples of electoral irregularities.
546 violations of the Election Law were filed against individual voters, and 78 cases of electoral fraud and misconduct plus 370 lawsuits have been filed against the former NLD government for failing to fairly oversee the election process, Tin Maung Oo said.
Perhaps as a means of disingenuously whitewashing this figure, the UEC’s Tin Maung Oo also added the obscure statement that more than 11.3 million voters “could have been misrepresented in voter lists as the election commission under the ousted civilian government did not compile voter lists for the 2020 elections with reference to data currently held by the immigration department.”
The military says that it has inspected every voter list save those of 25 of the country’s townships.
The National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in Burma’s 2020 elections. Despite the military previously citing voter fraud as a justification for the violent February coup, international observers and governments reported that no major irregularities or fraud were apparent during voting.
