Burnt Angthong ballots handed over to EC

Published on February 10, 2005

A Thai Rak Thai candidate in Angthong yesterday submitted 197 partly-burned ballots to the Election Commission, which he suspected were evidence of election fraud.

Prachuap Pao-in, who contested Constituency 2, said the 92 constituency and 105 party-list ballots all had Thai Rak Thai’s number “9” checked off.

Prachuap said the ballots were sent to his office by someone signing an accompanying note as “An Angthong Resident”.

He said the note claimed that the ballots were collected from a vote-counting centre in Pho Thong district that was hit by two power outages during a vote count on Sunday night.

In Prachuap’s constituency, Chat Thai candidate Somsak Prissanananthakul got the highest number of votes.

Prachuap said an early vote count showed him and Somsak running neck-and-neck but he ended up losing by 8,000 votes.

Thai Rak Thai legal expert Vichit Plangsrisakul said the ballots were all marked for number 9 and that it appeared some fraud was going on.

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