Monday, March 8, 2010

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...

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