CHIANG MAI — on October 18, Thein Soe, the chief of Burma’s Union Election Commission (UEC), announced that the international media would not be allowed to report on the country’s upcoming elections.

Burma's Election Commission has begun an education campaign on voting less than two weeks before the election, featuring videos on state-run MRTV, but one of the messages does not conform to its own electoral law in defining “advance [early] voters.”