The Election Commission is redrawing election constituency maps in eight provinces after the Constitutional Court ruled that non-Thai citizens must be excluded from the Thai population when calculating the number of constituency MPs for each respective province.

The Court resolved unanimously today (Friday) that the word “citizens” does not include people who do not have Thai nationality and, therefore, they should not be included in the Thai population, as reported in the census of the Central Domicile Registration Office, in the calculation of the number of constituency MP for each province.

The court’s ruling is not retroactive, which means that the calculation of the number of constituency MPs in previous elections will not be affected.

The census, dated December 31st last year, was used as the basis for the calculation of constituency MPs for each province. There are 400 constituency MPs for the whole country, plus 100 party-list MPs in the House of Representatives.

The Election Commission is expected to complete the redrawing of the election map and to publish it in the Royal Gazette in the next 1-2 days, because only eight provinces are affected, according to a commission source.

Source: Thai Public Broadcasting Service (Thai PBS)