Drafters' novel ideas creating doubts among experts, public

THE charter drafters have come up with novel ideas for their constitution which are causing concern among political observers, including a requirement that the election winner must get more votes than “no” votes. 

Some political analysts are concerned that “no” votes could impede MPs’ seat calculations and lead to a delay in forming a government. 

Other academics, however, said it was most unlikely that “no” votes, or a vote for none of the candidates, would knock out winning candidates in enough constituencies for it to matter.

Suriyasai Katasila, director of Rangsit University’s Thailand Reform Institute, said that if some constituencies’ candidates lost the “no” votes, it could affect the total MPs from both the constituency and party-list systems.

The Constitution Drafting Commission (CDC) has proposed that people seeking a constituency seat gain fewer votes than the number of vote “no”ballots – or ballots for none of them – the winner should not gain that seat.

Rather, a by-election should be held until there was a winner who could receive votes totalling more than other runners and the “no”ballots.

Worries arose because such a practice might make the total calculation impossible. Suriyasai agreed, saying the charter writers should be careful and come up with a mechanism or regulation to ensure the first parliamentary meeting could convene. Such an incident had happened before, he said.

He went on to say the mechanism could be used as a political means to slow down the process when there was a conflict and voters were dissatisfied.

However, Suriyasai agreed with the principle that the candidate could not represent the constituency if he could not outrun the number of people who vote “no”for candidates. One option to handle the issue could be for the Constitutional Court to step in with a ruling and end it.

However, Gothom Arya, a former Election Commissioner, and Attasit Pankaew, a political scientist from Thammasat University, felt it was unlikely that “no”ballots would be cast in such numbers.

They said it should not be a worry. Usually, if successful MPs counted 90 per cent of the total number stipulated in the charter, then the first parliamentary meeting was surely possible.

Attasit noted that in the past, a winning candidate would gain around 30 to 40 per cent of ballots cast. 

To lose to the “no”vote might only occur when other candidates gained very few votes, he said, adding that it was not very likely.

Gothom agreed and said it should not be a problem, especially if the CDC was reviewing dropping the initial Mixed Member Apportionment (MMA) and adopting instead the Mixed Member Proportion (MMP) system.

With MMA, when a polling station could not give the result, it would be impossible to take votes gained by losers to calculate the party-list seats, he said. But for MMP, the process could still proceed because it did not rely only on constituency votes.

Meanwhile, the CDC promised to use every vote cast for both the election winner and losers to count for the party-list seats. After proposing to use votes gained by constituency losers to calculate the party-list MPs seats, the panel met with criticism that it was undermining big parties.

Yesterday, Amorn Wanichwiwatana, CDC spokesman, said votes won by the winner would also be counted for the party-list. The drafters had some calculation methods in mind already, he said, adding that the panel would stick with simple mathematics.

It would try to prevent an ‘overhang’ in MPs in order to secure simplicity, Amorn said. ‘Overhang in MPs’ occurs when one party gains constituency seats that exceed its true popularity, calculated by party-list votes.

But if it was truly unavoidable, a fair number of MPs would be calculated from the simple ‘rule of three,’ he explained. The total number of representatives should be exactly 500 without odd numbers.

He also assured it would not give medium and small parties an advantage over big ones. The CDC would make the situation fair for every party, he said.