'Election court needed to oversee poll body'
With the three remaining Election Commissioners stubbornly refusing to quit despite a ruling they illegally managed the April 2 election, a deputy Democrat leader called yesterday for the setting up of an election court to monitor the Election Commission.
Alongkorn Pollabutr, in a seminar at Thammasat University, said a new round of charter reforms should give priority to tackling the controversial issue of how the political system can prevent "money politics", which political parties exploit to expand their influence over every social sector. "Candidates are required by law to run their campaigns under political parties," he said. "This has forced them to live under the yoke of the party, which could be under only one person who controls the whole party." As the Election Commission (EC), because of its mismanagement of the April elections, had become a symbolic failure of the charter, so an election court should be founded to check on the EC. "The public has totally lost trust in the commissioners," he said. Thammasat law lecturer Boonsri Meewong-ukote described the ruling Thai Rak Thai Party as a model of a non-democratic party. "The severest problem for Thai politics is that democracy does not exist in political parties - it is only one person or a small group of people who own them," he said. If the parties were democratic, they could select qualified candidates to become prime minister, he said.
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