The attempt to adopt a mixed-member proportional election system ...

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plied entirely separately, making it impossible to establish a relationship between
them via “subtraction.” In that case, the reference to “which method” could only be
applied to the eighty proportional seats with regard to the question of whether they
would be allocated via national lists or a number of regional lists.
Pisit continued his statement by saying that this point of “subtraction” was still
open for looking at the “details,” and “what was appropriate or not appropriate.” On
the one hand, he said, many CDC members had explained that they wanted to “subtract.”
If they subtracted, there might be the problem that Komsan had mentioned,
namely that a political party might have won too many constituency seats already
(meaning overhang or surplus mandates—Überhangmandate in German—in excess
of its overall proportional seat claim), “which is very difficult.” On the other hand,
many CDC members wanted to stick to the 1997 system. They preferred two ballots,
whereby 20 seats would be allocated according to the proportional ballot (bai khong
satsuan) in each region (at that time still thought to be four). In order not to increase
the confusion, he had coordinated with the CDC’s secretary about the “Wording”
(English in the original) used in the hearing draft. The secretary’s response had been
that they had not written the respective articles in the draft in a way that would finally
stipulate the use of subtraction or exclude it (ibid: 99f.).
In a hairsplitting sense, this might have been true. As for myself, from reading
the draft constitution with the 1997 system in mind, I always understood that the CDC
had passed the 1997 system in a modified version. It never occurred to me that this
would merely be a preliminary formulation, which did not yet determine the fundamental
form of the country’s election system as MMM. Nothing indicated, certainly
not to most people who read the draft, that what was written in it could be turned into
a proportional election system. In general, the comparison to 1997 was clear enough:
the formula of 320 to 80 replaced that of 400 to 100, thereby reducing the total number
of MPs by 100; the party-list component was changed from one national list to
four regional lists; the threshold was abolished; and multi-member districts were reintroduced.
Both the draft stipulations on the election system in article 92 and the reasons
that the CDC had provided in its book distributed for the public hearings regarding
the changes it had made over the 1997 constitution clearly confirmed the mixedmember
majoritarian system of the 1997 constitution. Nowhere did the text indicate
that all this, after the public hearing process had ended, could possibly be fundamentally
changed into a mixed-member proportional system. 31 This situation was the