New Thai Constitution

[scott...@gmail.com]

Have you guys been following the development of the new Thai constitution?  

It was ratified on August 7th.  

I think the election process for the House of Representatives is interesting.  What's your take on it? 

http://www.un.or.th/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2016_Thailand-Draft-Constitution_EnglishTranslation_Full_Formatted_vFina....pdf

Page 36.  Sections 86 - 91. 

 

To me it looks like they created a way to include third parties without disempowering them like range voting does. Range voting takes away the ability of third parties to get their agenda supported by threatening to play spoiler in single seat elections.  The Thai election process brings in third party candidates based on the number of voters who voted for members of a party, win or lose.  

Does the Thai style of election have a name? 

[Warren D Smith]

The whole thing is written in fairly disgusting legalese -- as opposed
to clear language, or as opposed to a formal algorithm statement and the
use of math formulas, either of which would have been far superior.

Section 86 p.37 appears to be enacting "Hamilton-Vinton method"
of "apportionment," which is a fairly decent apportionment method
which however was abandoned by the USA after the discovery of the
"Alabama paradox." Given that Thailand's total number of reps (house size)
is fixed, though, I do not see why the Alabama paradox should concern us.

In sections 90+91, they propose that there should be BOTH
house members elected from geographic constituencies, AND
party-list members elected from parties and not tied to any particular
geographic district. Apparently they intend to
create a so-called "mixed member proportional" house (MMP),
using "top-ups" from party-lists based on each party's share of
the total vote. Systems of this ilk have been proposed (but so far never
happened) in, e.g. Britain & Canada; and already were adopted by Germany
and New Zealand.





--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[Jameson Quinn]

It is a mixed-member, closed-list system. I don't like the closed-list aspects (leads to entrenched party insiders), but at least the mixed-member aspects ameliorate that somewhat.

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[Jameson Quinn]

Warren is right. But AFAIK the German and NZ systems are mixed-member open-list, which is more democratic than the Thai system.

[Warren D Smith]

I am confused about this:
In section 86 they are talking about how constituencies shall have differing
numbers of house members if they have sufficiently-differing populations,
with the numbers to be calculated based on (I think they intended)
Hamilton-Vinton method. Of course, since actually stating an
algorithm or any sort of
math (no matter how simple) is something they absolutely refuse to do,
we have great difficulty being sure of what they intended.

BUT in section 85, they say "Election of members of the House of
Representatives on a
constituency basis shall be by direct suffrage and secret ballot, and
there shall be one
member of the House of Representatives in each constituency"
NOT differing numbers like it says in section 86.

How the hell do we resolve this contradiction?

Moving on, just after that in section 85 they say
"An eligible voter shall have the right to cast ballot for one candidate or
not to cast ballot for any candidate in his or her constituency.
The candidate who has received the highest votes and such votes are higher
than the votes not cast for any candidate in a constituency shall be elected."

This sounded like plain plurality voting, except for the last half of
the final sentence,
which sounds like... what the fuck? This is just one of a zillion examples
of where they do not say clearly what the hell they mean, as opposed
to, if they'd
used math, we'd know what they meant.

(And then note, in the section 86 districts with more than 1 rep, how
the hell is
he to be elected?)

So I claim this constitution simply does not tell us what it wants in
clear language,
and one is left guessing or improvising. But I do get the general flavor.

The Swiss Constitution, also available online in multi-languages, is far far
superior in terms of clarity and understanding what it is asking for.
And that is
because, this constitution was largely (re)written bit by bit in
referendum after
referendum changing (or not) each little piece -- probably about 100
referenda in all.

The Swiss constitution is, in fact,
the best I ever saw when it comes to clarity, and played a large role
in convincing
me that the USA's constitutional amendment process NEEDS TO BE FIXED
so that we too can have a huge number of constitutional amendments,
easily, by referendum, happening all the time. (As opposed to:
essentially never.)
The proof is in the pudding. If referenda and massive numbers of
amendments via referenda produce better constitutions than
professional legislators and convention committees -- which far as I can
see is clearly true -- then stop relying solely on the latter.

[scott...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the feedback.

quote from Warren:

Moving on, just after that in section 85 they say 
"An eligible voter shall have the right to cast ballot for one candidate or not to cast ballot for any candidate in his or her constituency. The candidate who has received the highest votes and such votes are higher than the votes not cast for any candidate in a constituency shall be elected." 

unquote

I actually got a chuckle out of that section when I first read it. I says that if no candidate can't do better than "none of the above" no candidate gets elected.  I guess I'm thinking of the current US presidential election. 

Anyway, there is a decent pre-analysis from 2011 available online that goes into some of the background that motivated the design of the 2016 Thai constitution. It's here if you are curious.  

http://www.gmfus.org/publications/understanding-thailands-ongoing-political-crisis-wider-implications-southeast-asia-and

I like watching the Thai constitutional exercises.  With an average of about one new constitution every 4.5 years, they have more experience at it than pretty much any other nation, so they are an interesting source of data points. I hope they do well with their new constitution.