Next local election before general election?

Election poster from the 2008
Surat Thani PAO election

The local election became officially suspended after the coup by the 85th and 86th NCPO announcement in July 2014, though actually the few elections scheduled for the days after the coup were also first postponed. This month the last big number of local governments have the terms of mayors and councillors end, there were only few elections after October 2013, so by now almost all local governments either have the election positions vacant or the terms of the previously elected office holders were extended indefinitely.

Already in summer this year, and now again, the government hinted that they consider to use the local elections as a precursor to the general elections, now after many delays tentatively scheduled for November 2018. Given that there's still long time till that election date, this will probably mean that all local governments would have to held their elections at the same time. In past, there were two years which had many elections - because most of the TAO were created in 1996 (2143 units) and 1997 (3637 units), and the other two years have much less. It's of course also possible that the government will start with a local election in Bangkok as the most notable local government and do the rural units in a second step - because the not-yet-filled Election Commission still has to prepare the constituencies for all of the municipalities which had any changes in the last 4 years, not counting those where an adjustment of the existing constituencies is necessary due to population changes.

As I try to fill all the mayors into my XML files, doing so for all of the 7853 local governments at once will be a big effort, doing the 2000-3000 units in the big election years already kept me busy some weeks.

Local elections 2014

For the last years I had found Excel sheets or PDF files which listed all the local administrative units which have a term end in the respective year, which helped me a lot to get a complete coverage of the local governments and their elections. Though I knew this year is a rather quiet year with only relative few term ends, I was hoping to find the same list again. However, in yet another redesign of their website, the Election Commission removed the page which collected the links to these files, and I wasn't able to find any new source. With lots of other sources I was however able to fill in all the election dates in 2010, except one I could not find anywhere - the subdistrict municipality Tha Kham (เทศบาลตำบลท่าข้าม) in Phetchabun. The Election Commission only had the confirmation of the 2010 election results which listed all the names of the elected councilors and the mayor, but not the date of the election. Also the source where I get most of the local government election data, a database by the Department of Local Administration, omits the councilors and mayor in this case.

Though I had done several attempts with Google before, this time I finally stumbled on a document database of the Election Commission containing many of announcements - interestingly named "OldDocList" even though it is still actively used, the latest document is dated May 12th, just one day old. I tried my luck to search for the words "local term ends" (ท้องถิ่นที่ครบวาระ), and to my surprise there was one PDF for 2014 together with the old one I already knew, the document I failed to find for months. Sadly a PDF again, and only a scan of a PDF, so no way to convert it into a Excel sheet to be easier processed, but since I only needed one of the dates that is no problem. So finally could add the missing election to be dated October 3rd.

Though the year is already half over, the little statistics from the first page is worth noting. There are 690 local elections scheduled this year, 524 in municipalities, 145 in TAO, 2 PAO chairmen elections, and one the Bangkok council elections someday in October. Last year there were 3596, and 2012 a total of 3116 elections - and I am still working through the backlog from these years to get the XML up to date.

Busy times

To my shame I have neglected the blog in the last month, mostly because I was very busy with working through issues which not directly could be made into a blog post.

One big task has reached another milestone - I finally finished to add the election dates in 2004 which I could deduce from a PDF by the Election Commission listing the term ends of 2008. I now have little over 19,000 council elections in the XML, and a somewhat smaller number of mayor elections since I only added them if I have the name of the mayor, or the term differs from the council term. But sadly the elections aren't done completely yet, this year had another 3,500 local elections. Though there is no concise collective result, at least a good part could be found on the various pages of the province branches of the Election Commission. I am still working on adding those, so more on that in a separate blog posting.

The other task started with my "discovery" of Wikidata. I have now worked through all the Wikipedia articles on the administrative subdivisions and added the ID at Wikidata to all the corresponding entries in my XML. This included several merges of Wikidata entries, where two language editions of Wikipedia had an article but those were not joined yet. Also, some had to be split, the good old confusion between district or subdistrict and the local governments (cities, towns). Now there are 2362 Wikidata items, almost all correspond to at least one Wikipedia article. The next steps are now the programming of a bot to fill these items with statements - I have started and succeeded with a few test edits, but the library to access Wikidata with C# needs a lot of rework before it becomes really usable - so another work to do. At least I have to do some programming, not just XML editing... I detailed analysis of the Wikipedia article I found during this inventory will be posted later, and of course will keep you updated once the TambonBot starts operating.
I wish all my readers a happy Christmas and a good new year, hope I can return to the more regular posting after the holidays.

Local elections this year

Two months ago I completed the election data for the years 2009 to 2012, so that for every local government unit I already had at least one council term in my XML files. Two months later, I now finished another year, the elections taking place in 2009 and thus ending this year - another 3722 data points. I have already started the final complete list I found at the Election Commission with the elections which took place in 2004 and ending their term in 2008 - thus most of those which had their latest election last year. Those are another 3135 data points, but working through those may be a bit faster since back in 2008 there much less local administrations which had their mayor and council term out of sync.

I also found a source for the official election endorsements at the Election Commission, many PDF files which list the winning mayor and council candidates, both for the main election as well as for by-elections. Though only maybe half of the provinces are found in that collection, and it also just goes back till the spring of 2012, it also made it possible to add a lot of data to the XMLs.

Those sources combined made it possible to notice that the yearly tables for the Election Commission cannot be trusted fully - especially for the council sizes there are changes which cannot be explained. It seems that in the older table for several TAO simply the number of Muban in the Tambon was used to calculate the council size, ignoring the fact that some of the Muban may be completely within a municipality and thus not eligible to elect councilors to the TAO. But since Muban can also be shared between municipality and TAO, it may even be possible that the Muban area under jurisdiction of the TAO has no citizen. I now have 65 cases where the council seemed to have changed, but I could no verify whether it really changed or one of the numbers is simply wrong.

Finally, thanks to the online archive of the +Phuket Gazette, I was able to reconstruct the election history for this one province since the turn of the century, including the very interesting case of Pa Tong municipality which had three election within few months - the first and second election after its upgrade to a town in 2002 were nulled due to election fraud.

I have to hurry to work through the 2008 data, because soon the municipal upgrades will begin - with around 3249 TAO having either (or both) a mayor or council term end this year, several will get upgraded to municipalities. So far only few upgrades were decided and documented in the board meeting transcripts, but to be effective in September when most of the terms end I soon have to focus on those as well.

Changing TAO council sizes

The size of the council of a subdistrict administrative organization (TAO) varies a lot, because every administrative village within the TAO has two elected councilors. Only in case there are less than three villages, the number of councilors per Muban is higher since the minimum size of the council is six. Thus there are TAO councils between six and more than 50 members. But not only the size of each TAO council differs, also the size of one TAO council can change - whenever a new administrative village is created, the council will be enlarged by two seats. The councilors from the village which is split are assigned to that part village in which they live, so its no necessarily the seats from the new village which will be filled in the by-election.

Now I add the council term ends in this year and thus the election dates for 2009, I stumble over several cases where the council size has changed between the 2005 and 2009 election. In those cases where I know that a new village was created during the term that change is easily explained - one example can be the TAO Chae Chang (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลแช่ช้าง) in San Kamphaeng district of Chiang Main province. In 2005 the council had 14 members, in 2009 it had 16 members. Today, the subdistrict contains 10 administrative villages - thus at first one would expect 20 TAO members. But village 7 is completely covered by the municipality San Kamphaeng and thus is not eligible to send councilors to the TAO council, and for village 8 the area which belongs to the TAO is unpopulated, only for Mu 6 one part of the population belongs to the municipality and another to the TAO - so effectively there are eight Muban for the TAO. And since village 10 was created in 2006 there must have been a by-election to enlarge the council shortly after the new Muban became effective.

This way I could already explain a big number of the council size changes, but sadly no all. Even though those files from where I copy my data are published by the Election Commission, they obviously contain wrong data - for example for the TAO Don Du (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลดอนดู่) in Khon Kaen province, according to the EC tables the council had a size of 18 in 2005 and 24 in 2009. But - the subdistrict has 12 villages and no area shared with any municipality, and already in 2002 it had 11 villages. Only one village was added in 2006, so the number for 2005 must have been 22, not 18. There were even a few cases where instead of the number of seats the table showed the number of constituencies (i.e. of Muban). In other cases, there were smaller councils in 2005, and in 2009 the council had two members for every Muban - but part of the subdistrict belongs to a municipality, and there were no boundary changes between TAO and municipality as far as I knew. So I have no idea why those Muban were eligible to have councilors in 2009, but not in 2005.

Apparently, the Excel sheets and PDFs from the ECT were created manually, otherwise such obvious mistakes could not happen. If I could spend more time on the programming part of my data collection project, I would easily have a small tool which could output the same tables from my collected data. But then there's still the problem that I don't have the full source data, I can only reconstruct them from those files I have. Especially whenever a mayor or a council ends its term prematurely I would have to update the data in the XML directly - but I rarely find these information at the ECT provincial websites.

Local government terms 2009-2012

The task which kept me busy the last months was to add election data to my XML files reached a first milestone. On the website of the Election Commission, I originally found an Excel sheet with all the term ends of the local government councils and mayors in 2012, and after some more searching another Excel file for 2009 and two PDFs for 2010 and 2011. Since those files cover the last four years, in principle I should now have data for every local government unit. But actually, a few are still without - those which ended their term in 2008, but had the next election in 2009 are missing, especially the TAO upgraded to municipalities in 2008. Nevertheless an impressive number of local government units:

Year	TAO	Thesaban	PAO
2012	2201	838	76
2011	550	333	3
2010	75	210	1
2009	3589	237	1

An example entry in the XML, taken from the subdistrict municipality Khlong Cha-un in Surat Thani, looks like this

<council>
  <term begin="2012-12-16" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" />
  <term begin="2008-11-09" end="2012-11-08" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" />
  <term begin="2004-07-25" end="2008-06-30" type="TAO" size="26" endreason="StatusChange" /> 

</council>

Notice that the last term as a TAO ended about one month before the nominal end of term because the upgrade was effective a little earlier than in most cases - normally the upgrade happens on the day after the term ended. Such cases of prematurely ended terms are the most interesting ones, and will write up some articles on some types of premature ends - the end due to a status change is the least interesting one.

And I am not yet done with this huge task of adding term data, in the meantime the term ends in this year were published as a PDF, and I also found another PDF with the data for 2008. This year there will be a total of 3596 term ends, again a lot of TAO end their term since it is 4th four year period since 1997 when 3637 TAO were created. And again a significant number of these I expect to be upgraded to municipalities this year.

Local government elections this year

Finally I have found the page within the Election Commission website where they place the links to the most important reference lists. There is has the full results for the last three parliament elections, the latest senate election, and also the lists of the local government term ends starting in 2009. These lists keep me busy for some time already, extracting the election dates from there and adding them into the XML files.

Thus I now also have the list of all the term ends in this year, the actual election date for each of the local government unit will be chosen by the Election Commission when it reaches its term end. But since each term is exactly four years, this table now enables me the get the election dates in 2009. However, one big drawback is that the list is a PDF file, whereas for 2012 and 2009 there were Excel sheets. I was able to convert the PDF back to a Excel, but all of the vocals and other letters below or above the consonants were lost in the process, making it somewhat more difficult to work through the list.

Most of the 115 pages of the PDF are this list, but there are a few statistics at the beginning of the document as well worth mentioning here. This year, terms will end for the mayor and/or the council in 3596 local governments.

• 5 Provincial Administrative Organizations (only mayors)
• 341 municipalities
• 3249 TAO

And while the municipal elections are spread all over the year, September will see 2941 TAO ending their terms. Thus there will be a lot of local elections in October, but probably also again quite some number of TAO upgraded to municipalities which is normally done with the term ends. Also interesting - in 105 TAO and 21 municipalities the mayor and the council have different term ends, mostly caused by mayors who did not complete their term.

Times between local elections

As I am now adding lots of local election details into my XML, it now becomes possible to do some automatic calculation of election statistics. Though I am far from having a full coverage of the local elections of the most recent past - right now I have 4775 council elections with at least the election date - a few quite interesting things show up.

At first, most of the local election take place on either Sunday (4244 or 89%) or Saturday (410 or 9%), but there were also election on every other weekday. But it gets more interesting when I have more than one election date for a given local council, as then it is possible to calculate the time between the end of term and the election of a new council. By law, after the end of term the next election has to take place within 45 days, however this can be extended by the Election Commission. This takes place especially when the constituencies of the election need to be changed, either because the size of the council has changed, or the population numbers within the constituencies have changed significantly.

The number of days without a council within the limited data I have so far differs from 31 days, e.g. for Chiang Mai municipality earlier this year, when it had the election on April 8, exactly one month after the term ended on March 8. Quite striking however is the longest time I have spotted so far, more than once year for Pho Sadet municipality in Nakhon Si Thammarat. The TAO Pho Sadet was upgraded to a municipality effective October 7 2011, the first day after the TAO council term had expired. However, the first election for the municipal council and municipal mayor took place on November 11 2012, more than one year after the upgrade. For whatever reason, it took so long to split the area of the subdistrict into two constituencies with roughly equal population, as the constituencies were officially announced on October 10 2012, just shortly before the election date.

Right now, the median value of interregnum lengths is 52 days, however this is mostly a selection effect since I have mostly the election data for TAO upgraded to Thesaban - as soon as I add more of the recent TAO elections the number will certainly go down. But since it such a big pile of data to work through, and only part of it as handy Excel sheets which I can convert to XML code easily. In order to show how the data is represented in the XML, below is the code for the Pho Sadet council elections, snipped to show only the most relevant parts.

<entity type="Tambon" name="โพธิ์เสด็จ" english="Pho Sadet" geocode="800118">
<office type="MunicipalityOffice">
[...]
<officials>
<official title="Mayor" name="เกรียงศักดิ์ ด่านคงรักษ์" begin="2012-11-11" beginreason="ElectedDirectly" />
<official title="TAOMayor" name="เกรียงศักดิ์ ด่านคงรักษ์" begin="2007-10-07" end="2011-10-06" beginreason="ElectedDirectly" endreason="EndOfTerm" /></officials>
<council>
<term begin="2012-11-11" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" comment="Constituencies took 1 year to finish" />
<term begin="2007-10-07" end="2011-10-06" type="TAO" size="18" />
</council>
</office>
[...]
</entity>

Local election coverage at Election Commission

In the last weeks, a lot of local governments - especially Subdistrict Administrative Organizations (TAO/SAO) - had elections for their councils and usually also for the mayor. These are the reason why I haven't been able to post as regularly and in-depth here lately, as I am trying to keep up to date with all these and incorporating at least the basic data - the name of the mayor and the begin and end of the terms of the mayor and the council - into the XML files. In order to do so I have to rely on the data posted at the website of the Election Commission (ECT), or more exactly at the sub-pages maintained by the provincial branch offices of the Election Commission.

I have found several very detailed files already, most helpful so far are two Excel sheets which list all the entities which have their term ended in this year and in 2009. And the most detailed data for one specific province is available from the Trang office - an Excel sheet with all the councilors and mayors and their dates of election, including by-elections of councilors. Last updated in May 2011, it helped me to get Trang almost completely covered. Just hope there'll be an updated version of that file after the current row of elections is done.

But sadly only some of the provincial commissions keep their webspace updated, with items like a complete election reports containing all candidates and the votes they could win, or at least a list of winners like the one I just recently worked through for Nakhon Si Thammarat. Others provincial branches did not update their election calendar for months, or have no results from any elections. The worst is Bueng Kan, there even the start page shows a "Under construction" sign - should have been enough time since the creation of the province to get the website filled with content as well. But since its simply impossible to work through all the 3116 local elections this year, I focus on the southern provinces and those where I find very comprehensive documents - browsing through several long PDF just to find an election date is just beyond what I can manage. Of course I would be happy if anyone would help to update the XML files, then I could focus on programming something using these data, like my own dynamic election calendar.

Municipal Constituency definition

Last week the first 2011 announcement of those I monitor was published in the Royal Gazette, which was about the constituency definitions for the municipal council elections in Khao Wua-Phloi Waen subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลเขาวัว-พลอยแหวน), Tha Mai district, Chanthaburi province. While this kind of announcements does not give much of information for me - especially as the boundaries are defined in words only without any map, nor much reverence to the village numbers included - one aspect of this publication is worth noting.

The announcement was signed December 21 2010 by Election Commission President Aphichat Sukhakkhanon (อภิชาติ สุขัคคานนท์), so they were published rapidly after being approved. However, the municipality was already created effective July 31 2009, thus almost one and half year after the upgrade of the TAO and the end of term of the TAO council there wasn't yet any election of a new council and mayor. I earlier programmed a small function which calculates the times between the board meeting and the corresponding constituency announcement, and this gives a mean time between the two of 188 days. Yet, in this case it was 542 days, which makes it the longest time between board meeting and constituency announcement, even 20 days more than the previous record from Bang Krathuek in Nakhon Pathom. Due to all the aborted TAO upgrades as well as some missing board meeting transcripts I cannot tell if there's currently any other municipality still waiting similarly long.

I have no idea what is the reason for these long delays, which of course prohibit the election of the new council and mayor after the upgrade. In some older constituency definitions the boundary was defined with the Muban numbers, and also in the few cases where the website of the municipality includes the constituency information it seems that usually the constituencies contain complete Muban. However for this none I have no idea if the constituency boundaries run along the Muban boundaries, but if that is the case the long time to define the constituencies would be even more surprising - as all it'd take then would be to create two groups of adjoining Muban with an approximately equal population.

Local elections in Surat Thani 2011

The websites for the provincial election commissions have now been all moved into the main election commission website. I have only checked the one for Surat Thani, which has all the former contents removed and now is almost empty - except that I found the calendar of local elections for next year in there. Actually, it's not the calendar of the election dates but the calendar of the end of terms, the election is then normally within 60 days after the end of term.

As one can see from the list below, the elections will start in September or October. It may also be the chance to upgrade some of the TAO to municipalities, which is normally done at the end of the terms.

• August 4: Surat Thani city
• August 10: Ko Pha Ngan subdistrict municipality
• August 10: TAO Chaiyakhram, Don Sak (only Mayor)
• October 6: TAO Makham Tia, Mueang (only Council)
• October 6: TAO Krut, Kanchanadit
• October 6: TAO Ko Pha Ngan (Only Council)
• October 6: TAO Ban Tai, Ko Pha Ngan
• October 6: TAO Don Sak
  
• October 6: TAO Pak Phraek, Don Sak


• October 6: TAO Khao Hua Khwai, Phunphin


• October 6: TAO Tha Rong Chang, Phunphin


• November 10: TAO Ban Yang, Khiri Rat Nikhom


• November 16: Chang Sai subdistrict municipality, Kanchanadit

Provincial election commission websites

The Election Commission of Thailand (คณะกรรมการการเลือกตั้ง ECT), or maybe more exact the provincial branches, are responsible for organizing the elections for the local government entities. Whenever I try to to add some more data to my XML, I use the province of Surat Thani as the testing case, so that one is usually the most detailed XML.

So, I tried my luck to find some data on the local elections, especially the TAO chairmen and municipal mayors, on the website of the Provincial Election Commision (sic!) Suratthani. I found a few PDFs with results, e.g. the mayor and the 12 councilors for Yan Din Daeng subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลย่านดิน) elected on November 4 2009, sadly only the names of the winners are given, but not the actual vote numbers and the defeated candidates. However, one of the PDFs is missing and gives a 404 error, same as several other links on the main website. Only with Google I was able to find a second page with some older results. But somehow I doubt these were all the recent elections, there must have been more in the last two years than the approximately 10 which are covered in any of the PDFs. But no trace of anything like a complete list of local government entities with the end of term of their councils, so one could easily see when and where elections are forthcoming.

And my usual rant - since I tried to notify the webmaster on the missing PDF, which should contain the results for 9 entities, I noticed that the hotmail address at bottom of the website does not work at all, and at the other address my email was apparently ignored.

The website has a lot of potential of improvement, at least it is not infiltrated by malware - one better does not visit the website of the Provincial Election Commission of Nakhon Pathom...