Fighting for democracy under Thailand’s military regime is more than an election result. It is in the mobilization of Thai people to protect their ballots across the country.
The recent election results marked a historic moment in Thailand. The victory of the opposition parties signals a desire for a return to democracy. Yet, this is not the first time that the opposition parties have won a majority of votes while under military rule. But the prior election results in 2019 were overridden by the military government. Observers are cautious about celebrating too soon.
Thai people, however, are not holding their breath. It is not just the results that are significant. Unlike the cynicism that accompanied the 2019 election, there is a groundswell of hope among Thai people. It is this kindred hope, of which the election result is an important symptom, that is the real victory of this election.
A Dark Precedent
The 2019 election was a dark moment in Thailand. It was the first election since the military coup of 2014. Even though the opposition party won a majority, the results were marred by questions of electoral fraud. Even as Thai people watched the election results reported live on TV, votes would suddenly disappear right before their eyes. There would be blackouts. After the power returned, vote tallies would be changed dramatically. The voting results in the South disappeared entirely and were left unreported until the next day. The Election Commission (EC) delayed announcing the final results without any justification. Three months after the election, they also blatantly admitted that they forgot to include votes from those who cast their ballots in advance of election day.
These scandals ushered in a malaise and a deep feeling of futility: what was the point of voting if the results were to be staged anyways? More than 1.3 million people signed the online petition via change.org to impeach the EC. The online petition, however, did not lead to anything tangible. People were upset but felt hopeless to bring about changes under the military regime.
Photo 1: A Graph Showing a Fluctuation of Vote Counts Reported in 14 Hours, Source: iLaw
Organizing Against Fraud
Fast forward to the present and malaise has been replaced with an upbeat optimism. Thai people turned out to vote in record numbers. But this was not accomplished overnight.
Right after the 2019 election, civil society groups began planning their next move. They took months to learn the logistics behind how votes are tallied from each polling station to the central system, how frauds could occur, and the lessons learned from the previous election. One of the problems they found was that the EC never digitalized the results from polling stations, making it difficult for the public to verify the final results. From this, Vote62 – a network of NGOs, social-tech companies, and media agencies – created a system to crowdsource real-time ballot-counting. Half a year before the 2023 elections, they began campaigning to recruit 100,000 volunteers to monitor vote-counting at just as many polling stations. The hope was that the presence of people at the polling stations would deter fraud and provide a potential source of verification if any irregularities occurred.
This was easier said than done. The campaign to recruit volunteers was a long and arduous process. Thai people were unfamiliar with what election-monitoring even was. Civil society groups campaigned in more than 350 events in six months. They trained volunteers how to differentiate a valid ballot from a voided one, what actions to monitor, how to take photos of the voting results to upload in the crowdsourcing system of Vote62.
Photo 2: Election Monitoring in Action
The organizers never actually believed that Vote62 could obtain their target of 100,000 volunteers. The day before the election, the number of registered volunteers was only just above 30,000. They were not even sure if their plan would work. “We just knew that we had to do something,” said one of the organizers. But hope builds its own momentum. Their campaign and video-training spread organically, from people on the street, social media influencers, to TV coverage. What happened on the election day went far beyond their expectations.
Turning up and turning out
On the election day of May 14, Vote62 received almost 500,000 photos of vote tallies submitted by Thai people nationwide. Their webpage reported 4.2 million views. It is still unknown exactly how many volunteers there were, but it definitely exceeded the minimum 100,000.
At the polling stations, volunteers begot more volunteers. Voters who had not heard of Vote62 stuck around after the ballot closed to join in the election-monitoring. Some stood for 4 hours in the rain. Despite not knowing each other before, a spirit of camaraderie quickly emerged: people organized themselves to share their tasks, food, and mosquito repellent with each other.
Photo 3: People Standing in the Rain to Monitor Vote Counting.
Pre-empting the mysterious power outages during the previous election, they used their phones, torchlights, and even their car lights, to literally light-up the polling stations when they were too dark to monitor the vote-counting. They also caused EC staff to recount votes in instances of discrepancies.
Photo 4: Lighting up the Polling Station using Car Lights.
Hope is Catching Fire
What is remarkable about this election is not merely the results themselves. It is not surprising that Thai people do not accept military rule lying down. But keeping the fight for democracy alive under a military regime can often feel futile. What civil society has accomplished is more than elicit greater transparency at the ballot box. They have kindred a belief in Thai people’s own political agency against the odds – the self-confidence to stand up for their own rights and to act out against power. It is a spirit that takes a life of its own and is not easily put out.
What happens next will surely be far from straightforward. However, as one of the organizers, Yingcheep Atchanont, put it: “Seeing how Thai people turned up on the election day, I feel that with or without civil society groups, Thailand is not the same country anymore.”
Bio: Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC. She is a Sigur Center Summer 2023 Research Fellow. To learn more about her, visit her website: https://jittipm.wixsite.com/jittipm.
