A mobile phone app produced ahead of Myanmar’s November 8 elections to provide voters with information about candidates and the electoral process has recently come under fire for its use of a derogatory label for candidates who are Rohingya Muslims.
The app, mVoter 2020, which was introduced less than a week ago, is a collaborative effort between the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), a tech team in Myanmar known as Popstack, and the Union Election Commission (UEC) which functions as the nation’s election umpire. It contains biographical details on nearly 7,000 candidates contesting at different levels, allowing voters to search by constituency for verified information about political parties, policies, and also guidelines on how to vote. The text is also transcribed in the Myanmar language.
The Backlash From Rohingya Muslims
While the app was created to be a critical source of information for voters in Myanmar, especially in a time where campaigning has reduced due to the coronavirus, it has been called out by several groups for its use of the word “Bengali” to describe two candidates running in the elections.
Seen as a derogatory word within the Rohingya community, negative feedback trailing its launch has forced developers to remove the app from online mobile stores. Speaking on the issue, Marcus Brand, Myanmar’s Country Director of IDEA, which collaborated on the app’s development, stated that the information contained was provided by the UEC, calling on the election body to “remove the information from the app in order to ensure candidate security and increase the integrity of the process.”
Meanwhile, an activist group Justice for Myanmar said in a statement on Wednesday that the app risked “inflaming ethnic and religious nationalism during the election.”
Why It Matters
The app happens to be an improvement on a similar app released during the 2015 elections, which received over 12 million inquiries. The ongoing issue must be resolved to help Myanmar’s voting community make informed decisions at the polls. Also, voting information gets to reach a wider audience, especially now that the number of internet users in Myanmar has risen from nearly 7 million in 2015 to 22 million.
