Kawhmu, September 21

Aung San Suu Kyi today urged supporters to check their names on voter lists as her opposition party raised the alarm over “chaos” in Myanmar’s electoral rolls just weeks before historic polls.

Some 32 million people are eligible to vote in the November 8 parliamentary election, seen as a key test of democratic progress in a nation that only emerged in 2011 from a half-century of military rule.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy is widely expected to defeat the military-backed ruling party but has raised growing concerns about the electoral rolls, which it says are riddled with errors.

Speaking at her first campaign rally in her rural constituency of Kawhmu south of Yangon, the Nobel laureate implored local people to double-check their details on the voter lists.

“If you are not included in the voter list, correct it. You still have time,” she told throngs of supporters, many of whom wore their traditional ethnic Karen clothing and had plastered NLD stickers to their cheeks.

Poll authorities have vowed to ensure elections are credible and voters have until October to amend any errors.

But efforts to computerise electoral rolls have proved a major challenge for authorities, who have had to base their information on flawed and out of date official lists.

“The voter lists are in a state of chaos,” said the NLD’s Tin Oo, at a press conference of senior party figures in Yangon today, decrying an increase in errors since the last time the lists were put on display.