School teachers attending training sessions for the Myanmar Electronic Voting Machine (MEVM) have revealed that the voting machines planned for use in the military council’s upcoming election can be easily manipulated to alter voting results. According to teachers attending township-level training on MEVM usage, the machines allow polling station officers and local ward/village election officials to modify election results at will.
One teacher attending the training explained that the voting machine allows polling officers and local election commission members to instantly change results if they act in agreement. While previous elections allowed for vote recounting and verification through paper ballots when results were suspicious, the new voting machines leave no physical records or ballot counts, putting all control in the hands of polling officers and election commission members. The teacher noted that the paper slip printed after each vote serves merely as a receipt similar to store purchase receipts, rather than official documentation that could be used as evidence.
The military council’s voting system consists of three components: the Ballot Unit (BU), Control Unit (CU), and Verification Unit (VU). Voters will not use paper ballots but instead press buttons on the Ballot Unit to select their preferred parliamentary representative. While the military council claims voters can verify their votes through paper slips printed by the Verification Unit, training participants point out these slips function only like store receipts and cannot serve as valid evidence of votes cast.
The military council has announced plans to deploy nearly 55,000 of these voting machines in the upcoming election, marking the first transition from paper ballots to electronic voting machines. However, training participants and local election commission members report that while they receive instruction on machine operation and control procedures, they are given no explanation of the technology used to manufacture the devices or their technical specifications. The focus remains solely on operational procedures.
Another staff member attending the training emphasized that the system is not automatic but manually controlled, meaning that if polling officers and local election commission members collude to falsify results, no evidence would remain as both the machine and results remain under the complete control of the operators. The military council is planning to hold this election of their own design later this year, having nullified the results of the 2020 election in which the National League for Democracy won by a landslide.
