Urgent : EC endorses 349 constituency seat winners for Lower House
More than five weeks after the country’s first general election in years, the Election Commission (EC) on Tuesday endorsed 349 successful constituency candidates to sit in the Lower House of Parliament, just one short of the 350 seats contested.
The vacant spot is for a constituency in Chiang Mai province that will see a by-election later this month after the March 24 winning candidate was disqualified, said the agency’s deputy secretary-general, Sawang Boonmee.
However, not all of the 349 candidates to be seated in the House of Representatives are yet fully in the clear, as Sawang said disqualification remained possible even after they had taken office.
Currently, there are some 40 cases being investigated by the EC, involving MP disqualification and electoral fraud.
If found guilty, endorsed MPs could still lose their status and face punishment, the deputy secretary-general stressed.
By Thursday, the agency will also reveal the 150 successful party-list MP candidates to make up the remainder of the 500-member chamber, he said.
However, the question of the method used for the allocation of party-list seats is still pending in the Constitutional Court.
Sawang said the EC had to announce the election results by Thursday, as required by the Constitution.
The electoral agency already has plans for whatever method it might have to use after the Constitutional Court rules on the basis for party-list seat calculation, he said, declining to disclose those plans.