The acting chairman of Burma's ruling party has conceded defeat to Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition and said he would accept the result of the country's first free national election in 25 years.
Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) leader Htay Oo said: "We lost."
The vote count is still under way and no results have been officially announced, but preliminary reports from around the country indicate a wide margin of victory for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).
A NLD spokesman said the party had won 80 per cent of the votes counted so far in the country's central regions.
Suu Kyi told a crowd gathered at the party headquarters: “I think you all have the idea of the results.”
Urging peace, she continued: “It is still a bit early to congratulate our candidates who will be the winners. I want to remind you all that even candidates who didn’t win have to accept the winners but it is important not to provoke the candidates who didn’t win to make them feel bad.”
Htay Oo, a close ally of President Thein Sein, said: "We have to find out the reason why we lost. However, we do accept the results without any reservations. We still don't know the final results for sure."
He said he was surprised by the scale of his defeat in his own parliamentary constituency in Hinthada, in the delta region, considered the heartland of the USDP's rural support base.
"I wasn't expecting it because we were able to do a lot for the people in this region." he said. "Anyway, it's the decision of the people."
The elections are thought to be the freest ever held in the country. For the past five years there has been a quasi-civilian government in the form of the Union Solidarity Development Party, which was largely made up of former members of the military junta after decades of military rule.
Thirty million people in Myanmar were eligible to vote for 91 parties in this election, although the main competition is between the NLD and USDP.
The elections have been criticised for barring members of the Rohingya Muslim community from voting.
If the NLD are victorious in the election it does not mean Suu Kyi will become president as there is a current rule, widely believed to have been re-written to prevent the 70-year-old from being leader, which prohibits anyone with a foreign spouse or child becoming president.
Suu Kyi’s two sons are British, as was her late husband Dr Michael Aris.
The junta had been in power after a 1962 coup. They annulled election results in 1990, when Suu Kyi’s party won the majority of votes.
Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in 1989, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and was finally freed in 2010.
Additional reporting by agencies.
