EC ouster push stepped up

An official shows a ballot during the vote counting at a polling station in Bangkok on March 24. (Photo by Apichart Jinakul)

A group of activists have set up a desk in downtown Bangkok for people to sign a petition to remove the seven election commissioners.

The group, led by Sirawith Seritiwat, set up the desk on the skywalk linking the National Stadium with the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre on Saturday afternoon.

The campaign is a response to reports of several irregularities in the organisation and delayed vote counting of the March 24 general election.

The same activity will be held again on Sunday near the Victory Monument.

Mr Sirawich said many students from at least 18 universities all over the country and civil society groups had loosely formed the People’s Coalition for Fair Election and his group was a part of it.

The coalition has accepted 3,000 signatures. Once the number reaches 10,000, it will submit the list to ask the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) to remove the commissioners on April 9.

Earlier, a user by the name of We Love Thailand launched an online petition at Change.org to unseat the EC. As of 5pm on Saturday, 823,000 people had signed the petition against the target of 1 million.

Section 234 of the Constitution empowers the NACC to investigate and give opinions on whether holders of positions at independent bodies have intentionally abused their power or seriously violated the ethical code. After that, the NACC votes on whether to send the case to the Supreme Court for politicians for a final ruling.

Civil society groups have joined hands to monitor the poll by asking people to take photos of the final vote count posted in front of each polling station and send them to the group to check against the results the EC had announced. The EC is also being urged to disclose the results at each of the 92,000 polling stations, instead of by constituency.

Among the irregularities found is the discrepancy in the number of voters, which was 13% more than what was reported in the previous announcement. On March 24 the commission said voter turnout was 65.9%, or 33,775,230, but on Thursday it said turnout was 74.7% and the number of votes was 38,268,375.

The EC explained that some 2.9 million advance votes and 100,000 ballots from foreign countries had not been included in the first announcement. As well, the earlier count was based on 93% of total votes and Thursday's announcement was based on 100%.

But observers have argued that the advance votes had to be sent to be counted at their respective constituencies on election day so the results at those districts should have already included them.

At some stations, the number of voters also fell short of the ballot count and some advance ballots were sent to the wrong constituencies, which led to all of them being nullified. As well, the results shown on the boards did not always add up to what the EC has announced.

The EC has blamed some glitches on the software used in the reporting system linking local counting locations with the commission’s computers.

We Watch, a non-government organisation, held a briefing on Saturday about its election findings.

It found the election was peaceful but said a lack of transparency, efficiency and fairness remained a challenge.