[UPDATED 5 July 2011. The map above is has been changed and is now based on the final count. Five or six constituencies changed hands in the final counting.]
This is the result soon after midnight, with 95% of the vote counted. Around 5 seats are very close and could change on the final count.
As in every poll since 2001, the voting has a strong regional pattern.
In the upper north and most of the northeast, Pheu Thai not only swept all the seats but won huge majorities. Pheu Thai also did well on the outskirts of the capital. This is the same as in 2007. They did better than 2007 in the central region.
The Democrats won the south, western hills, and eastern seaboard (except Chonburi where the Khunpleum family has formed a private party), again mostly with huge majorities. They again won the city centre, gaining more seats than in 2007, but often with very narrow majorities. They did better than 2007 in the Malay-Muslim far south.
The other parties in total won about the same proportion of total seats as in 2007. Banharn’s party has been halved in size.
Two particular anomalies strike me in the results.
There were apparently 1,750,000 spoilt ballot papers (This doesn’t include the “No” voters) Out of some 31 million voters that is a very high percentage indeed. I wonder if any analysis exists of how these spoilt ballots were spread regionally or even on a constituency basis. Even more interesting would be a breakdown of what exactly constituted the “spoiling”. Bearing in mind the concerns about the way that the Pheua Thai logo was displayed, it would be interesting to know just how many ballots were spoilt because the voter had marked the wrong box. The significant difference between the exit polls and the actual result could be related to this if, for instance, people told pollsters that they had voted one way or another when in fact their vote was actually discounted.
The other glaring anomaly is the result in Bangkok. Whereas in all the other regions the actual count bears a reasonable resemblance to the exit poll, In Bangkok it was totally reversed; 28:5 in favour of Pheua Thai turns out to be 23:10 in favour of the “Dems”. That is a remarkable statistic.
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Not to point out the obvious- but I think you have to say that the discrepancy between final tally and exit polls was primarily due to sample size. Each and every one of the smaller parties was under represented in the exit polls- sometimes drastically so. While there may have been other errors in play, this seems to be the most clear difference and can easily be explained by polling occurring outside of the specific constituencies where smaller parties picked up their seats.
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pff123. That doesn’t actually follow. With exit polls, as opposed to opinion polls, the question of sample size doesn’t really come into it, and the under-representation of the smallest parties was statistically pretty insignificant. The difference, 48 seats, is mostly accounted for by the under-representation in the exit polls of “Dems” and the two middling parties, Chartthai Pattana and Bhumjai Thai, particularly the latter. Could be that BJP voters were simply too shy to admit how they had voted!
I am still inclined to conjecture that the high number of spoilt ballots could have been the biggest factor. After all, with the option to vote “No” there was little reason for anyone to spoil their vote deliberately.
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@Sceptic
A lot of the spoilt papers were from those who voted no. 5 for both constituent and party-list. Chuvit’s party only had party-list candidates.
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Wern – 5
A lot of the spoilt papers were from those who voted no. 5 for both constituent and party-list. Chuvit’s party only had party-list candidates.
Of course that makes a lot of sense. Thanks Wern.
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Not saying I agree 100% with his analysis, but see Bangkok Pundit’s take on invalid votes at http://asiancorrespondent.com/59121/what-of-the-no-vote-and-the-spoilt-ballots-in-the-thai-election/
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Well guys, can we get back to talking about Chris Baker’s electoral map? Nice work, once again Chris, but this distribution of seats is perhaps too stark a representation of political party preferences/strengths in the country-in terms of popular support anyway. Perhaps it would be useful to cross-hatch those constituencies that were won by narrow margins between the main contesting parties in each constitutency, say by between 3,000 to 2,000 votes. In Bangkok, for example, at least 5 constuencies were won by narrow margins (either PT or DP). This would reveal the Democrat dominance in the metropolis to be less hegemic than it appears on a zero-sum victory map. So too, in the 3 southern border provinces – eg. Sukarno Matta of Peu Thai apparently lost to the Democrat candidate in Yala constituency 2 by just 28 votes!!! And note the Democrat loss of Satun Constiuency 1 to Chart Thai Phattana.
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Wern
LesAbbey
Assumed that’s the case we would have 800k of spoiled ballot, we still have about another million that result from something else.
Which I suspect might be this
http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=212591245451701&set=a.211191062258386.58666.100001024807284&type=1&theater
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# Sceptic
Agree totally. Pundit’s analysis is interesting, but does not confront the issue about the design of the ballot papers, which was different from previous polls, different between the constituency and party-list, and hence very confusing — creating a “hanging chad” opportunity.
I’d love to investigate the distribution, but where is the data? I can’t find it. If anyone else can point to a source, I’ll work on it.
#8 Marc
Agree again. Which is exactly why I commented about the margins in the short (2 a.m., heavily jet-lagged) text on the post It’s striking how large are the majorities for both parties in their heartlands (S for DP, Upper N and NE for PT), and how tight are many of the contests elsewhere.
How to map this? Maybe a map where the shading shows the percentage gap between the first and second candidate. Anyone else got suggestions? Marc?
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Can someone help me here? The EC is saying that Chuwit is to blame for so many spoiled votes. They say this is because people marked 5 on the constituency list as well as on the party list. I haven’t seen a constituency ballot paper. Does it mean that in each constituency that every party is listed and not just those standing in that constituency? I asked a friend and was told it is just the candidates in the constituency listed. How does this statement by the EC make any sense?
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Ralph Kramden – 12
I haven’t seen a constituency ballot paper either, but the post from Bangkok Pundit tends to say point otherwise from what your friend said.
[UPDATE: The Thailand head of an international NGO who was observing the election in a province outside of Bangkok e-mails - confirmed they are who they say they are as they are using their work e-mail address - stating "[a]t the Polling Center we observed counting, a number of spoilt ballots was due to No. 5 being marked on the Constituency Ballot Papers. We were prohibited from taking photographs of the counting process”. Person has asked to remain anonymous as they don’t vote the information to be seen as a formal statement by their organization. So this confirms what BP had read elsewhere online].
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Interactive map of preliminary election results in Bangkok can be found here:
http://mangomap.com/map/user/bangkok%20election%20results%202011
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@chris baker: I can help you with creating a map of the percentage gap between first and second candidate. We have the table with the data, I just need the constituency boundaries, which you seem to have, based on the map you posted on 2nd July.
Drop me a line at paul [at] mangmap.com
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The friend may be wrong Les. I am asking because I don’t know. Anyone know for sure?
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Chris,
Unless you can find a way of coding the party identities of the victors for constituencies together with percentage of victory, the map will not have too much clarity. Then again, it may look a little cluttered. For visual purposes, I suggest to keep the map simple, perhaps by sticking to a Pheu Thai vs Democrat representation of degrees of victory at national scale, then producing separate maps highlighting key contested regions/subregions, such as Bkk, Lower northest, and 3 border provs where other parties were key players and victors/runners-up.
The results for the 3 bdr provs appear decicive on the victory map, but as you note, there were some very close contests. Eg The sitting PT member Sukharno Matta lost to the Democrat candidate in Yala Constituency 2 by 575 votes (I correct my earlier erronious figure of 28 here), with the Democrat victor winning with 28,636 votes. In Pattani Constituency 1, centred on the town of Pattani with a large concentration of Thai Buddhists traditionally voting Democrat, DP sitting member Arnwar Sarlae won by under 5,000 votes (with 28,740) against a strong Bhumjai Thai competitor. As you mentioned, the DP party strongholds of the Thai-speaking south won decisive victories: so eg., Pattalung, Songkhla, and Nakhon Srithammarat saw wins by DP candiates (both standing members and new faces) of around 60,000 votes, way ahead of the runners-up. Clearly the border provinces remain exceptional in their much lower overall support for Democrats.
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The argument that many of the spoilt ballot papers resulted from voters marking No. 5 on the constituency ballot paper would appear to make some kind of sense. Apparently that is also the case that the Election Commission is attempting to make. I have one problem with it. That is that the exit polls gave Chuwit 3 seats, whereas in the event he got four, which seems to indicate to me that he actually received at least as many votes as predicted, and probably more. So that does not seem to leave much room for spoilt ballots. Of course you could argue that this will not have affected his party vote ballot paper and would only have resulted in a number of wasted constituency ballot papers. The problem with that is that the overall difference between the spoilt party papers and the spoilt constituency papers is only about 0.8% which still leaves an awful lot of unexplained spoilt votes.
The Bangkok result still amazes me. Where the difference between the exit poll and the official result represents a swing of more than half the seats (18 out of 33) from Pheau Thai to the “Democrats”, something is very strange indeed. One of the recognised advantages of exit polls is that they provide a rough and ready reckoner of possible electoral fraud, particularly ballot stuffing. Surely such a thing could not have happened in Thailand?! But I do wonder whether the Election Commission has actually instigated an investigation into what is clearly an interesting statistical anomaly.
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Wern
I’ve posted a link that shows a invalid ballot with a mark on PT’s logo box, but it didn’t show, anyway, EC was just using chuwit as scapegoat. Chuwit got around 870k constituency so its almost safe to assume that he got the same amount for electoral (and I’m being generous here) then we have another 2 million invalid ballot that need some explanation.
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Is it me, or does this map actually present quite a reasonable fit to how Thailand was before it became a modern nation state around a century ago?
On one side (more or less), the areas with a history of at least some central control – the central plains, the lower north, Chanthaburi, Khorat, the south (excluding the Malay states).
On the other side we have the tributary states, the “colonies”, the Northern Ireland’s of this part of the world.
It makes you wonder if after a century of this “Nation, Religion and King” business that it might not really have entered people’s hearts as much as you once thought.
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For those who are interested, Bangkok Pundit now has a clear explanation of how constituency voting is done, with voters getting a list of all parties standing candidates, not in each constituency but for the country as a whole. Had never even thought about this before as a possibility. No wonder people get confused.
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For Ralph Kramden and LesAbbey, regarding the spoiled constituency ballots, Bangkok Pundit had a second post that explains the challenge associated with the constituency ballot (http://asiancorrespondent.com/59281/what-of-the-%e2%80%98no-vote%e2%80%99-and-the-spoilt-ballots-in-the-thai-election-part-ii/).
Basically, the EC produced a single, nationwide ballot for use in the constituency contest that did no include party names or logos, and there was no indication about which party had candidates running for seats in each constituency. The Pundit’s post has a sample of the ballot, makes it very easy to see where the confusion could arise.
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Thanks Brent. It does make more sense than the conspiracy theories.
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Interactive map of Thai election results:
http://mangomap.com/map/user/thai%20election%20results%202011
Thanks to Chris Baker for contributing his constituency boundary data.
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