Bangkok – The Election Commission of Thailand (EC) said it did not tamper with poll results, confirming that last Thursday’s announcement of vote count did not change constituency election outcomes.
Deputy Secretary General of the electoral organ, Krit Urwongse, explained that the reason why the EC did not announce 100 percent of election votes on Sunday, March 24, was because some of the polling places were not able to access the “Rapid Report” system developed specifically to feed real-time vote counts to the public.
Explaining why the number of ballots increased by 4.5 million when election results were made public on Thursday, Krit said ballot papers cast by overseas voters and those voting outside of their constituencies were not included in the first announcement on March 24. 2.3 million ballots were from advance voting and up to 100,000 ballots were from overseas voting. He also admitted there were miscounts on the number of voters and the number of cast ballots.
Out of 186 petitions submitted to the EC, seven of them demand a recount of the ballot. Police Colonel Jarungvith Phumma said a recount can only be conducted on a case-by-case basis and that a retabulation of all votes cast in the election is not permitted by law.
