Poll likely to see record voter turnout

Published on February 6, 2005

Unprecedented numbers return to their home provinces for voting

Yesterday at Mor Chit Bus Station you could be forgiven for thinking that the Songkran festival was coming ahead of schedule this year. Throngs of people were swarming around the station buildings, desperate to leave Bangkok for their home towns. Yet they were keen to be back home not for water-throwing but rather for vote-casting festivities.

“It is a very promising sign, and a new record in voter turnout is expected,” Election Commission Parinya Narkchattri commented.

Today’s election is the second general election held under Thailand’s 1997 Constitution, which makes it a “duty” for all Thais aged 18 and up to cast their votes. That, coupled with highly publicised election campaigns over the past months, should guarantee a record turnout of over 70 per cent, eclipsing the 69.9-per-cent attendance number of four years ago, Parinya said.

Thawatchai Phaoluangthong, managing director of the Khon Song Company, conceded that his transportation company had been caught unawares by the sudden influx of passengers lighting out for their hometowns.

“It’s quite unlike it was before,, and we did not prepare adequately for it,” he admitted. “Waves of people have been flooding in since last Tuesday and will be continuing even today. What we can do is try to arrange as many extra buses as possible.”

Crowds of people were congregating especially around the Northeastern terminal, he added.

At the Southern bus station, Hua Lampong railway station and Don Muang Airport similar chaotic scenes were roiling.

Jitsanti Thanasophon, governor of the State Railway of Thailand, said the numbers of the railway’s passengers this past Friday and Saturday had swollen considerably since comparable days last week, causing the company to hitch extra carriages to trains heading off in specific directions. The Bangkok-Ubon Ratchathani railway is one such route, he said.

As on the ground, so up in the air. Executives at two low-cost airlines, Nok Air and Air Asia, said all their flights were fully booked. They added, however, that election day or not, this was generally the case on weekends.

Nalin Viboonchat, a resident of Nakhon Ratchasima waiting at the end of a seemingly endless ticket line at the Mor Chit bus terminal yesterday, certainly wished he could be borne home by jet engines.

“I decided to avoid travelling on Friday night, when I know most people are heading home,” a clearly exasperated Nalin said. “But it turns out I was wrong to think today fewer people would be around. I may just decide not to go, because I have to be back at work on Monday.”

Some irate passengers lashed out at the commission for having managed its information campaign about early voting so poorly that most people did not know how to avoid such communal last-minute dashes for home.

At Nakhon Ratchasima Bus Station, which serves as the gateway to the northeastern provinces, some 10 thousand people were thronging the place late into the night yesterday.

But it was not just public transport that was on the receiving end of welling masses.

In Satun province, numerous district offices were packed with people who were there to get new identity cards in place of their expired documents, enabling them to vote. Most of them were Thais just back home from work in Malaysia, a local official said, adding that the sudden influx of applicants, some 150 a day over the past three days, risked crashing the offices’ computers.

Sucheera Pinijparakarn

The Nation

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