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Published on December 25, 2007

A new round of voting has been scheduled for Sunday, January 13, which imme-diately follows National Children's Day, said EC chairman Apichart Sukhagganond yesterday.

Disqualified candidates will not be allowed to contest the new poll while those given "yellow cards" can still run.

The first batch of endorsed winners is expected to be announced by January 3.

More than half of over 1,000 complaints involving election fraud filed with the Election Commission were found to be false, Police Colonel Jarungwit Phumma, the deputy secretary-general in charge of investigations, said yesterday.

Of the 1,030 complaints received by the agency between last Thursday and yesterday, 678 were found to be groundless, Jarungwit said.

"We are investigating the remaining 352 complaints," he added.

Most of the complaints, received via phone and the agency's website, were from northern and north-eastern provinces, he said.

A total of 139 petitions

have been filed against elec-tion winners, 38 of them involving vote-buying allegations, Jarungwit said.

He said 48 of the petitions have been submitted to the EC for judgement.

A total of 32.1 million out

of 45.6 million eligible voters

- or 70.2 per cent - turned out to exercise their rights on Sunday, EC secretary-general Suthiphon Thaveechaiygarn said yesterday.

In constituency voting, void ballots totalled 2.5 per cent, compared to as many as 5.2 per cent in the proportional voting, he said.

Slightly over 4.3 per cent of voters opted not to vote for any constituency candidate in particular, while 2.7 per cent did not vote for any political party in the proportionate balloting, according to the EC official.

Apichart, the EC chief, yesterday complained about the slow progress of vote counting from the provinces.

"I want to announce the official results for all the 480 House seats as early as possible because everybody is waiting," he said.

The EC chief said the slow progress and some inconsistencies in the vote count might be due to lack of experience on the part of volunteer election officials in the provinces. He said the agency was working to rectify the problems.

 The Nation