Website collapse leaves EC racing against time to register advance voters

EC Office secretary-general Sawang Boonmee said many voters could not complete the registration process after the EC’s website collapsed at 9pm Sunday. Sunday was the last official day for voters to register their intention to vote in advance.

Sawang said the website could handle 4,000 registrations per second but a surge in registrations close to the deadline may have exceeded that limit and caused the website to collapse.

He said officials were trying to solve the problem by contacting users who could not complete the registration process on Sunday, to collect the missing information.

Sawang said he could not say how many days officials would need to complete the registration process for all website users.

A total of 2.4 million voters successfully registered to vote in advance or from abroad. The EC expects the final figure to be close to 2.6 million, the number of advance voters in the 2019 election, once officials manage to complete the disrupted registrations.

Sawang said the EC would coordinate with the Foreign Ministry and Consular Affairs Department to organise voting by Thai expats.

He said the EC Office and Thai embassies have rehearsed sending ballot boxes back to the Kingdom to avoid the kind of vote-count delay seen in New Zealand’s 2019 election.

Separately, Sawang said the EC is still awaiting an official explanation from the Pheu Thai Party on how it would finance its policy of handing 10,000 baht via a digital wallet system to all Thais aged 16 and above.

The policy was announced by Pheu Thai prime ministerial candidate Srettha Thavisin.

If Pheu Thai fails to explain how it would finance the policy, the party would be deemed to be violating Article 5 of the MPs Election Act, Sawang added.