The 2019 Thailand General Election is scheduled to be held on Sunday March 24,2019
The date was set by the Thailand Election Commission on January23, 2019, only hours after a royal decree was issued authorising the poll.
Voting will take place under a military-backed charter, ending one of the longest periods of rule by a military junta in Thailand’s modern history
Thailand heads to the polls Sunday to vote in the country’s first general election since the military toppled an elected government in May 2014
The date was set by the Thailand Election Commission on January23, 2019, only hours after a royal decree was issued authorising the poll.
Voting will take place under a military-backed charter, ending one of the longest periods of rule by a military junta in Thailand’s modern history
Thailand heads to the polls Sunday to vote in the country’s first general election since the military toppled an elected government in May 2014
Once the junta was in power, it tore up the
constitution and had a new one written that significantly changed the
nation’s political structure and electoral rules.
Observers
say the new system was designed to limit the power of big political
parties like those that dominated past elections and to increase the
need for a coalition government. They say it will also give the
military’s allies an inside track on leading the next government.
Here’s a look at the system:
Appointed Senate
A
250-member Senate has been established and all of the senators will be
appointees selected by the junta. The junta has said its selections will
be revealed after the general election.
Elected Lower House
The lower house of parliament will consist of 500
members, all of them elected. The majority of members — 350 — will
represent individual constituencies around the country and be directly
elected by voters in those areas. The other 150 will be party list
members, selected from slates of candidates designated by each party,
with winning seats assigned in rough proportion to the total share of
votes each party receives nationwide.
At The Polls
Voters used to cast two ballots, one for their
local member of parliament and the other for their political party
preference. The process was relatively straightforward and allowed
voters to have local loyalties that differed from their national
political party allegiances. Under the new system there is just one
ballot and the vote for the local member of parliament will also count
as one’s party preference.
Popular Party Woes
The number of seats allocated to each party is
determined by a convoluted formula that handicaps those parties winning
the most constituency seats, by putting a soft cap on the number of
party list seats it can be awarded. Midsized parties that win fewer
constituency seats are compensated with a lesser handicap, with the
rationale that parties with substantial yet weaker vote totals deserve
representation. In other words, voting for a big party’s representatives
dilutes the value of one’s party list choice, and lowers the number of
house seats that party can accumulate. This weakens bigger, more popular
parties.
Prime Minister Pick
A voter has even less of a voice in picking the
prime minister, not just because he or she is indirectly elected by
parliament, but because the election is by a joint vote of the elected
lower house and the unelected senate. In theory, if all senators vote in
a bloc — say for the military candidate who appointed them — a prime
minister nominee could win the job by getting just 126 votes in the
lower house. That means such a nominee would just need to woo 25 percent
of the elected members of the house, plus one more, to become prime
minister. The prime minister does not need to be a member of parliament.
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