The public can monitor Bangkok officials checking ballots for the May 14 election via CCTV installed at polling stations, deputy governor Sanon Wangsrangboon said on Thursday, after inspecting the strongroom being used to store ballots at the election administration centre at Phra Nakhon district office.

He said the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has installed CCTV cameras and motion detectors in strongrooms at selected polling stations across the metropolitan area. The rooms, which are restricted to authorised personnel only, are being used to store ballots for advance and normal voting.

The public can monitor the stations via CCTV online at https://general-election.bangkokcc.com/.

He also advised the public not to mistake the ballot-checking, which runs from Wednesday to Friday, as an attempt to tamper with ballots.

The BMA has added a “situation update” section to the website to notify the public of the latest developments regarding officials’ work in the strongrooms, the deputy governor added.

“CCTV surveillance is being implemented to ensure transparency of the election, which is an important process that does not happen frequently,” he said. “We need to ensure that people’s voices are protected, while facilitating the work of officials and ensuring that every party has a mutual understanding of what is going on.”

The election administration centre at Phra Nakhon district office supervises polling stations in the five districts of Phra Nakhon, Pom Prap Sattru Phai, Samphanthawong, Dusit (excluding Thanon Nakhon Chaisi subdistrict), and Bangrak. The centre’s strongrooms will store 143,820 ballots for polling stations in these districts.

Phra Nakhon district alone has a total of 34,234 eligible voters and 63 polling stations.

Sanon added that the BMA had also included information on the locations of all 6,327 polling stations in Bangkok on the website, in case people want to learn about the situation at other polling stations on Sunday. These data are the same as those published by the Election Commission (EC) on their website.

Sanon added that the BMA has consulted with the EC regarding installing CCTV cameras in strongrooms, and the commission had confirmed that surveillance is permitted to ensure transparency of ballot storage.

However, the EC prohibited installing CCTV cameras to count the number of voters on election day, as this would constitute a violation of personal rights.

The BMA is also planning to use the AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system to help read data from photos or scanned documents to speed up election results reporting, he added.