More than 167,000 officials will be deployed by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) at 6,817 polling stations, 50 district offices and City Hall this Sunday to ensure smooth, safe and secure Bangkok gubernatorial and council elections.
Election equipment, such as ballot boxes and count and announcement boards, will be checked tomorrow in each of the 50 districts. The locations where ballots, ballot boxes and other election-related equipment are to be stored before and after the elections have also been chosen and will be checked, according to Deputy Permanent Secretary of the City Administration Suthathip Soniam.
61,353 officials are to be deployed at polling stations covering all 50 districts. There will be 13,634 security officials and 13,634 health volunteers, to ensure compliance with COVID-19 safety measures at the polls and about 78,272 other officials.
When voting closes at 5pm, officials will start simultaneously counting the ballots in separate boxes for the gubernatorial election and the council election, with the results on separate score boards.
After the completion of the counts at the polling stations, all ballot boxes will be sent to their respective district offices, together with the vote tally, to be tabulated and recorded. The vote tally for each district will then be sent to the command centre at the Second City Hall in Din Daeng.
Suthathip said the vote count at each polling unit should take two hours at most and the results will start flowing from the polling units at about 7pm.
Head of the Bangkok Election Commission Somchai Surakarnkul said that a special area at each polling unit will be designated to accommodate voters who are infected with coronavirus, adding that Braille ballots have also been arranged.
He assured that the election result assessment system will function properly, as it has been used before without problems, and that the unofficial election results can be announced quickly, adding that he is not concerned about a system failure as there is a backup system on standby.
31 candidates have registered to run in the Bangkok gubernatorial election, but one, former secretary-general of the Office of the Judiciary, Sarawut Benchakul, has been disqualified. Three of the 382 candidates registered for the councillor election have also been disqualified. A fourth, Pornpimon Kongudom, a candidate for Bang Sue district, died.
