VI - Cleaning Up the Election: The New Election Law, PollWatch, and the Media

Summary

The 13 September election inherited a number of electoral mechanisms initiated for the 22 March election to make the polls cleaner and fairer. In the March election, there were a number of significant changes, such as improvement in the election law, the establishment of a polls-monitoring body, PollWatch. The efforts were geared first and foremost to prevent vote-buying, which has always been rampant in Thailand's elections. Vote-buying can take many forms, the most direct of which is candidates giving voters money in exchange for votes. A study has shown that the amount of money involved ranges from 30 to 500 baht per vote, depending on how rich the candidates are and how competitive the contest is. Besides vote-buying, there are other forms of illegal activities — undertaken by canvassers for politicians — which have been known to compromise the standard of the electoral process in the past. These include organizing feasts for potential voters, arranging tours for canvassers both in Thailand and abroad, contributing to temples, schools, and so forth, “betting schemes” whereby voters are encouraged to support a particular candidate through placing bets on losers and winners, and providing transport to take voters to polling booths on election day.

With regard to legal change, first of all the Interior Ministry since the March 1992 election has raised the ceiling on the amount of money a candidate can spend, from 350,000 to one million baht. Its reasoning was that it was impractical to limit spending to only 350,000 baht when the actual cost for a candidate to run in an election was much higher. The one-million-baht limit pleased those who wanted to be strictly law-abiding but felt that certain expenses had to be incurred.

The Interior Ministry has also changed the election law to make the election more transparent so that it is more difficult for illegal activities to slip through, particularly those relating to vote-buying.