Thailand Holds Elections for Lower House of Parliament, Official Results Within 60 Days

China News Agency, Bangkok, May 14th. Thailand will hold elections for the House of Commons on May 14th. Voters from all over the world went to their local polling stations to cast their votes for the candidates and political parties they supported.

Voting starts at 8:00 and ends at 17:00 local time. Thailand’s Election Commission stated that the general election of the day went smoothly, and it is expected that the unofficial counting results will be released before 23:00 that day. Official results of the election are expected to be announced within 60 days.

In this election, a total of 6,679 candidates from 70 political parties competed for all 500 seats in the House of Commons. Among them, 400 seats are directly generated by voting in constituencies, and the other 100 seats are allocated proportionally according to the votes of political parties. The election adopts a “double-vote system”, where each voter casts one vote for a parliamentary candidate and one for a political party.

There are currently more than 52 million legal voters in Thailand. In addition to about 2 million people who have voted in advance due to reasons such as their workplace, about 50 million people across the country can exercise their voting rights on the 14th.

After the election results are officially announced, a new Thai parliament will be formed. The new Congress is composed of 250 members of the upper house and 500 members of the lower house. At that time, a total of 750 members of the two houses will vote on the prime minister candidates nominated by various political parties, and the elected prime minister needs the support of more than half of the members.

According to the news previously announced by the Election Commission, a total of 43 political parties nominated 63 candidates for prime minister in this general election. The current prime minister of Thailand, Prayuth Prayut, officially joined the Thai United Nations Party in January this year, and as the party’s nominated candidate for the next prime minister, he participated in the general election and sought re-election.