A computer error in calculating the actual number of voters in Tonzang Township’s Constituency 2 spread on social media on Monday, raising questions about an electoral race in the township and the number of people who participated in Sunday’s vote.
There are a total of 8,043 eligible voters in the constituency.
However, initial calculations suggested that Pau Lum Ming Thang, an electoral candidate for the Zomi Congress for Democracy (ZCD) had won his race in the constituency with 7,274 votes, and Thang Swin Zam, his rival from the National League for Democracy (NLD) had won 5,444 votes, for a total of 12,718 votes cast.
This number was 4,675 votes higher than the actual number of eligible voters. A lieutenant police colonel, Wunna Zaw, reported the discrepancy to Chin State’s election commission management committee on Monday. The issue then made rounds on Facebook until it was attributed to a computer error.
“There was a more than 4,000-vote difference. We found a typing error when we checked the data on the computer. The number of votes had doubled. I don’t know why it happened. We are lucky that we found the error before we officially released it,” Thang Houk Lan, secretary of the Tonzang Township Election Commission said.
Thang Houk Lan said that after the data was double-checked, Pau Lum Ming Thang had won 3,637 votes and Thang Swin Zam had won 2,760—exactly half the number that had been entered into the computer database and initially reported.
The township election commission secretary said that the votes would not need to be recounted and that Pau Lum Ming Thang, the ZCD candidate, had still won the race to represent Constituency 2 in the Chin State parliament.
In addition to the ZCD and NLD candidates, representatives from the Union Solidarity and Development Party, Zo Regional Development Party, and the Union Betterment Party also ran for election in the constituency.