Do You Think Elections Represent the Will of the People Represented? Let's Take a Vote!
Happy Thailand Election Day! And Also USA Mother's Day!
The outside of Baan Mark Prok school this morning, where my husband voted in the Thailand elections.
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
Josef Stalin
“Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Winston Churchill
It’s that time of year again. As billions of people celebrate this ritual worldwide, I figured I’d take a moment to explain to outsiders and insiders both how Thailand elections works. These are only my personal observations:
1. Elections in Thailand are held on a Sunday. What Sunday is debatable, as I have seen it held on many different Sundays regarding the month and the day of the month. I presume that no tradition exactly like the USA’s “First Tuesday following on the first Monday in November” thing exists here, probably because Thailand, with its many coups and suspension of elections, doesn’t have a firm tradition to piggyback on there.
2. Alcohol sales are suspended for 24 hours around election day, from 6:00 PM the Saturday night before to 6:00 PM (presumably after polls close) on the voting day Sunday evening. They apparently want their voting citizens in a clear and sober frme of mind. I’ve been swamped with low priority earnings edits all weekend and didn’t even know about the election. Last night on Saturday at 7:30 PM or so I went into 7 Eleven planning to buy three beers for me and my husband. No dice! So how heavily is this enforced? I walked to a local shop nearby, where the woman behind the counter both recognized me and realized that I was farang (i.e. white foreignor), meaning that I couldn’t vote the next day anyways. She discretely packaged my purchase of two Chang pint beers in a black plastic bag as a white man, also presumably turned away from 7 Eleven, waited behind me in line, this time with two Singha pints.
3. You definitely need to be a Thai citizen and show your valid ID card to vote here. This morning our brother in law took our motorbike for the approximately 32nd time we wanted it for something. No worries though as the son of our landlady showed up in his truck to take me and my (Thai) husband to the voting station. It was held at the local school, Baan Mark Prok, which my younger daughter attended for a short time.
4. I was regarded oddly as usual, but I wasn’t voting, rather my husband was. Some military guarded the voting area and I have been told that I cannot take pictures inside, even of simple things like the main Phuket governor’s candidate board which had many posts all over the island. This is fair enough. I suppose I could accidentally take a picture that reveals somebody’s identity and vote somehow.
5. There were absolutely no Diebold voting machines or electronic voting machines of any kind whatsoever at this station. Instead my husband went through a multiple point check showing his ID card. The first station he went to they said he needed to go next door for his subdistrict, then there was a multiple check in procedure involving first a military guy, then several Muslim women. There were two different main things being voted on the first of which was who would be the governor of Phuket province. There were 11 candidates on the board, 9 men and 2 women based on the pictures. There were also multiple separate initiatives each posted in Thai language solely. Not knowing what the initiatives were for, I probably would have automatically voted “No” on all of them. Perhaps some were wonderful and they had good ideas to increase freedom and prosperity. My experience is 90% of them would have done the exact opposite, if America is what I go by. I guess I have to use the USA as it is my only personal experience of voting.
6. Absentee ballots are accepted, but this involves a procedure of proving your identity as a Thai citizen in advance in person at a Thai consulate or Embassy overseas. This can be a long and expensive journey for many so around 700,000 Thai citizens voted in this way, far lower than the number who live out of the country.
All of the above sounds excellent for fair, free elections that represent the will of the people. Yet I have my doubts about the system. I definitely heard a rumor this morning that certain candidates for governor were offering cash for votes. Ha roy seemed to be the going rate. Now I have heard this before in Thailand, and perhaps it is not that terribly different from the “Free shit army” that is claimed to exist in America. Still I wondered about the logistics of it. Perhaps naïve Thais will vote for whomever promises to give them money, but why couldn’t politically savvy Thais promise it then change their vote at the last minute? Or is there some cash payout right on the spot? Wouldn’t that presume that your vote was coerced?
Does it all end up looking something like this? Regards to badcattitude or the graph:
My guess is America is not in a much different boat regardless. Who is counting the votes? And how do you know what is going on behind the electronic wall?
Happy Mother’s Day!
I checked 100% rigged and I want y’all to know, it’s not a guess. I KNOW. A dear friend has been working election polls for over a decade. She’s taken polling classes, whatever that entails. She’s their #1 hire!
The last presidential election, rather than beating her door down and begging for her college age kids and friends to help, assuring themselves she’d be at the helm, they ignored her. Crickets! She found out all the poll workers were hired through a temporary agency for the first time ever. Really??? On THIS election? She had to go through the temp agency to get her decade old job!!!!!?
She watched the complete untrained, incompetence all around her, and offered assistance at every turn. Eventually word got out that she had been Head Poll Chick for over a decade so they stood in line to ask her questions. All rules were broken, repeatedly. Rules like, chain of command. If you move a box of ballots, you sign them OUT of storage and INTO which kiosk. There’s a KEY and a passcode. There are QR codes, the works. There are bands like hospital bracelets
so people can’t rifle through there. The bands are to be issued and kept away from the masses. That day, there was a massive PILE of the special bands, allowing anyone to grab one, which allowed anyone to cut them off the banded ballots and rifle through, grabbing some if they saw fit, and then reband with a new, easily obtained band.
There were shredding trucks the first day, which typically don’t come till after 2 weeks. There was a water “leak” so everyone was sent home around 10:30, which my
friend said there was zero sign of a leak, no water was ever cut off in restrooms, nothing… Typically, on a NORMAL election year, they stumble home at 1 or 2am, but THIS year, they were sent home at 10:30??!? There were loads
more discrepancies with the untrained workers. She said it was almost as if someone WANTED chaos so things could happen that never happened before. She complained to higher ups well before she knew her candidate wasn’t winning. It was NOT a case of bitterness. She was deeply concerned that there was zero election integrity before she had a clue as to the repercussions.
Watching the
movie 2000 Mules showed her that other things people noticed that should not occur were going on all over the US. The entire few days they were “tallying ballots”. Jovan Pulitzer, a forensic paper guy (who knew we had that???) shows all manner of screwy things in ballots which make the machines not count certain ballots. It’s crazy, but it was a poop-show clusterbleep, all
the way around.
My friend said if there was even one more
thing they could’ve done to make it more of a clusterbleep, she could not imagine what it would be!
How do other animals handle the problem of leadership? How do wolves or elk elect a leader? (one on one fighting). How do ducks decide which is the lead duck? (they actually take turns, maybe because its lonely and more tireing to be the lead duck). Many other animals do not even seem to need leaders. For the animals I mention, they all move around the land in groups, large or smaller. We are generally more stationary, these days. I guess the differences for humans are many, we use money, we make objects we sell for money, we like paved roads for our vehicles, on and on. It seems a question of scale, the decision makers have become so removed both in distance and income from the general populace, they simply cannot represent, being so clueless about their constituents actual lives and struggles. Part of me hopes the dollar does die and fast; it will be devastating to me personally, but I see how it fuels so much badness from these voting frauds to the death vax itself, to the chemtrails overhead. I see few other ways to starve and kill this bad 'machine' we have made.