Myanmar holds a landmark election

By YANGON

IN A polling station in an unused shop-house, open to the street in downtown Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, votes are being tallied in the country’s first contested general election since 1990. The counting officer picks up a yellow ballot slip and displays it to the election observers. She shows that it is stamped with a tick against one party symbol, a fighting peacock, and declares it a valid vote for the candidate of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition party.

The slip is deposited in a plastic basket and the vote recorded on a wall chart by a man with a felt-tip pen who draws one side of a square; as more votes come, he adds the other sides and a diagonal to create five-vote boxes before moving on to a new one. By the end his chart has 62 NLD boxes and just six for the ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).