Bangladesh, Jan. 3 -- Myanmars planned election has drawn predictable international condemnation. Widely dismissed as a hollow exercise organized by a military regime that seized power through force, the vote is seen less as a democratic milestone than as an attempt to manufacture legitimacy. Yet the fixation on ballots and polling stations risks obscuring a far more consequential political act now unfolding in parallel: the juntas accelerated nationwide census. Unlike an election, which may be boycotted, contested, or overturned, a census has enduring power. It defines who exists politically in the states official imagination-and who does not.

In Myanmars fractured landscape of civil war, displacement, and ethnic exclusion, the census i...