Work this out….

The Bangkok Post reports: “While commending Sunday’s advance voting as relatively well managed, the Asian Network for Free Election (Anfrel) has urged the Election Commission (EC) to place more emphasis on the quality of polling booth officials and called for transparent storage and counting of ballots and transporting of votes cast outside home provinces…. Voters across the country were able to cast their ballots in a largely quiet and well managed election environment, thanks to the EC and all supporting organisations, the Anfrel report released on Monday said…. Some advance voters were not aware that their names remained on the old advance voting list in their former area of residence.”

The very same Bangkok Post reports: “As many as 500,000 eligible voters have lost their right to vote because of a misunderstanding and the Election Commission’s poor public relations, the People’s Network for Election in Thailand said on Tuesday…. [T]hose who registered to vote in advance outside their constituencies in the last election but had not withdrawn the names from the lists of advance voters, not knowing that they were required to do so according to an EC regulation. They wrongly believed that their names would be automatically put back in the lists of eligible voters in their constituencies after the last election and did not go for the advance voting on June 26. As a result, they had lost their right to vote in their home constituencies on July 3.”

“Some” = 500,000! Is Anfrel serious? If Anfrel considers this a hiccup, we wonder what fraud and incompetence will be defined as?

And that 500,000 doesn’t count the thousands who couldn’t get to vote despite having registered because the EC opened too few voting centers and thus had crowds of people backed up in some places for hours.

A quick bit of the data released so far, some one million or more may have been disenfranchised.

 

Advertisement