2019 Thai Elections

Today early elections kicked off in Thailand and I went to see how different things are here from elections back in Europe. It was my girlfriend's first time voting too!

We practically swam through the smog of current season with over 200 AQI (air quality index) and after 20 minutes long car ride we arrived at the International Convention center where the votes were being cast.

It's an enourgmous place but it was packed full. There were hardly any instructions of what to do or where to go so we wondered around untill we saw huge queues.

First part was to pick up a voting ticket. There were boards of regions and candidates from what I understood. A lot of people were browsing through them and seem to have been undecided who to vote for.

At this point it looked this this whole ordeal might take few hours, especially since after we got a ticket we were greeted by absurdly huge queue to get into the building itself where votes were cast. I failed to capture an image as we just took a different entrance that was completely empty?

The last bit took no longer than 10 minutes and we got to cast our vote!

I've noticed that majority of the voters were young people - this is early voting and we went mid day when it was really hot so my guess would be that older folks came early in the morning.

Of course like every gathering in Thailand this one is also accompanied by a huge market next to it. From bagged fruits to fried chicken - there was something for everyone to reward themselves of deed done good :)

This was definitely an interesting process to observe and only took 2 hours out of my weekend.
Despite having so many early voters the whole process was suprisingly quick, though not very neat compared to western world.
The future of Thailand is definitely exciting and I guess we'll see how things turn out but the voter turn out is definitely there!