Blame the EC

As the Constitutional Court accepts the “Ombudsman’s request for a ruling on the constitutionality of the Election Commission’s formula to calculate party-list MPs for political parties and will rule next Wednesday,” the EC continues a quiet and opaque process of disqualification.

It has “disqualified 11 former MP candidates of eight parties, effectively excluding another 12,000 votes from party-list MP calculation.” That’s 17 disqualified in this manner. While none were winners, the question is: How does this impact the “formula” that is itself under challenge?

Meanwhile, Future Forward are hitting back on the repeated complaints by Srisuwan Janya. Eleven candidates have filed complaints with the police. According to the report, they argue that Srisuwan has mischievously and falsely accused each of them of being media owners.

They claim that:

some of them did hold shares in media companies but the companies had long since closed and their names were still on the shareholders’ registry. Some of them … hold shares in companies which operates printing and publication services but are not mass media. The rest hold shares in firms which had not done anything for more than five years, which he said are regarded as closed by law.

This seems to be common in all of the cases and takes its lead from the EC’s own pre-election disqualification of a Future Forward candidate prior to the election. Blame the EC.