Back on the 8th of November, Myanmar had a legislative election. It was the second in their history. To run this operation....a national election commission exists.
So to the general landscape there? There's a population of 54-million. Roughly 37-million were registered to vote.
Voter turn-out? Around 75-percent....nearly 25.9-million.
Compared to five years ago? 23.9-million from a registered voting pool of 34.3-million registered voters.
Yeah, if you did the numbers....2.7-million more registered voters this time, than last time. Plus there are 2 more new plus-up votes compared to five years ago.
So how the election went? One single party got around 61-percent of the vote.....National League for Democracy.
After that, the 2nd place party (the Union Solidarity Party) got 3.1-percent.
The dozen other parties all got around 1-percent.
Then you come to the military 'guaranteed' wins.....no matter how folks vote....the military side of the house is guaranteed 25-percent of the legislative votes.
Well....things started to be openly discussed. Problems had occurred. Well over 200 serious complaints turned into the Election Commission during November and December.
The military itself? In the past month, they identified roughly 8-million problems with the national registration listing. No one is saying the extent of this....maybe it's people listed in multiple districts....maybe it's dead voters....this part of the story is missing a lot.
The opposition parties complained a good bit. If you subtracted the military guaranteed seats....then this National League for Democracy probably won near 75-percent of the vote.
So the army general of the country went to the Election Commission and just said you need to investigate this. Reponses? No. Last week was sort of a 'you-really-need-to-investigate' this....meaning the 8-million voter discrepancy. Nothing.
Over the weekend, a coup occurred. The political side of the government was 'fired' by the military. An election will be arranged in roughly a year (so they suggest), and the voting polls? Well...there is some wording that this problem will be worked upon and resolved by then.
Naturally....a whole of countries are furious about the arrests of the political folks.
The military worried about this? No.
All of this hurting tourism? Before Covid came along, Myanmar had bumped up to around 4.3-million guests in 2019 (generally averaging 2-million yearly for the past decade). My humble guess...2020 and 2021 are crapped out on tourism anyway.
Folks generally go for three reasons....lot of ancient stuff to see, a cheap cost for luxury hotels, and the fine hospitality of the Myanmar people.
So this whole election thing is about some registration issues? Yeah....mostly. No one is saying much over double-voting or dead folks voting. What they suggest is that a couple million folks have information on the registration forms which might not be correct (maybe a wrong address, or wrong birthday, or wrong ID number).
The odds of a second election changing anything (a year away)? If you assigned a hundred folks to the registration problem, my humble guess is that you could wipe out a quarter of these 8-million registration problems pretty easily. The next vote however....might be exactly the same.
To the last point, that this looks an awful lot like the US election, except no coup occurred? Well....yeah, there's that perception. But there is one plus in Myanmar....they have a national ID card....something that you can't possibly have in the US.
The odds of you getting this type of view via CNN? Zero. Even to suggest the basic facts of the coup? You'd get no response from them.
Just something to think about.
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