YANGON—In Sunday’s general election, Myanmar voters showed their desire to move the country’s democratic reforms forward by venturing out to polling stations amid a surge in COVID-19 cases. Though official data on the total voter turnout is not available yet, the country’s electoral body, the Union Election Commission (UEC), estimated on Wednesday that more than 70 percent of the country’s 37 million-plus eligible voters cast ballots.
A total of 5,639 candidates, including independents and representatives of 87 political parties, contested 315 seats in the Lower House, 161 in the Upper House, 612 in state and regional parliaments and 29 ethnic affairs minister seats. Voting cancellations in Shan and Rakhine states resulted in a reduction of 22 seats in the country’s 664-seat bicameral Union Parliament. (The figure includes unelected military seats.)
Given the current number of seats available, a party needs to win more than half of the total seats—in this case at least 322 seats— to form a government.
On Wednesday, Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) confirmed that it had secured nearly 400 seats in the Union Parliament so far, based on initial counts at polling stations. The UEC hasn’t finalized the results yet, but said on the same day that it would be able to announce the official outcome this week.
The following charts illustrate The Irrawaddy’s breakdown of the election results available so far for the Upper House and Lower House across the country.
Nyein Nyein, Nan Lwin, San Yamin Aung and Zaw Zaw Htwe contributed to this report.
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