Election Time In The Village

[otherstuff1957]

One of my wife's nieces (niece through marriage, not blood, so we went north, not south), was running for Moobaan อบต (Oh Boh Doh) in last weekend's election, so we had to go up to her province (in the lower north) so that she could vote. I gather that this position is equivalent to City Council or Alderman.

The niece in question is in her mid-thirties, recently divorced, University educated and has lived and worked in Bangkok for about 10 years. She went home late last year and then filed for divorce. Now, this is a small farming village, so unless she learned how to plant rice or opened a small shop, there really isn't much for her to do there. So, she decided to run for อบต in this election. The job pays about 10K a month and has a 4 year term.

Normally, there are 2 or 3 candidates, but this year there were 6, so the competition was fierce. The polls opened early in the morning and everyone lined up to vote. Everyone except me, that is. After seeing everyone lined up I wandered off in a fruitless search for a good cup of coffee. The polls closed at 3pm, so we walked down the street to see the results.

The polling station was a fair-sized shed with about 6 uniformed workers from the Tessabaan (they turned out to be teachers doing a bit of extra work for the government) as well as 3 local volunteers. After the polls closed, the shed was sealed off with yellow tape and the vote verification and counting was done. First, one worker would select a ballot & pass it to a second. The second worker would say whether or not the ballot was marked correctly (Bat Dee or Bat Sia) and then the number. He or she would then hold the card up so that everyone could see it. A third worker marked the votes on a whiteboard as they were called out. On the rare occasions that the third worker made a mistake, the crowd (about 40 or 50 people) didn't hesitate to correct them! The whole vote counting process seemed to be done in an open and transparent way.

Of the 6 candidates, 3 were men and 3 were women. The 3 women all got more votes than the 3 men. My wife's niece came in second by 4 votes (out of about 500 eligible voters).

The nieces parents had a party despite the loss, and when the beer and lao khao started flowing some interesting things were said. Now, the people in this area speak the northern dialect, or Pasa Nua, rather than standard Thai, so I really couldn't follow the conversation at all, but I did hear quite a few references to "500 baht". When I asked my wife about this, she told me that the winning candidate had paid many people 500 baht each to vote for her! My wife obviously didn't know the exact amount that "many people" was, but she thought that it would be somewhere between 30 & 50 people - or about 10% of the electorate. Personally, I found that to be an interesting peek into the vote-buying process. Obviously you don't need to buy every vote, you just need to figure how many people are going to vote for you anyway and then buy enough vote to get a victory. This woman almost guessed too low!

I know the niece fairly well (we saw a lot of her when she lived in Bangkok) and she speaks English fairly well. She did not pay for any votes & was not interested in winning the election that way, but she was quite disappointed to lose that way!

It was interesting to see a election like this. On one hand, the voting and vote counting seemed to be done in an open, professional and transparent way. Also, the youngest candidate was the one who refused to win by corrupt means, while the winner was one of the oldest candidates, so perhaps things will change for the better in a few years. However, in the meantime, it's easy to see why Thai politics continue to be plagued with corruption and incompetence.

The winner was willing to pay up to 25,000 baht to get this job. That implies that she expects to get at least that much back in kickbacks or bribes.

[Johpa]

One of my wife's nieces (niece through marriage, not blood, so we went north, not south), was running for Moobaan อบต (Oh Boh Doh) in last weekend's election, so we had to go up to her province (in the lower north) so that she could vote. I gather that this position is equivalent to City Council or Alderman.

The อบต is the tambon (sub-district) development organization. In many areas it has become a powerful force in the lives of the villagers. Many of the older administrative tasks of the local kamnaan, the traditional tambon (sub-district head) head, have been taken over by the local อบต office. It can suffer from the same elements of corruption as do any elections in Thailand, but it does attract some dreamers and grass roots activists. My brother in-law in a perennial candidate. He spent a few years down in Bangkok back in the 1990s with the demonstrations for the poor encampments. But he is always running against the local old boys network run by the kamnaan and vote buying and sometimes outright corruption at the polling place still prevent an activist like him from winning any election. But in my district the อบต has become the focal point for local democratic politics as the next level up, the district head (nai amphoe) remains a position appointed from Bangkok.