Wooing or exchanging votes in the Senate election are no longer deemed a breach of the Election Commission's (EC) regulations, Sawang Boonmee, EC secretary-general, said on Thursday.
Mr Sawang was responding to questions over whether it is against the Senate election rules for candidates to encourage votes for themselves or promise to exchange votes among them.
Following a petition lodged against the EC's initial restrictions imposed on candidates' election campaigning, the Administrative Court on May 24 ruled against such restrictions, which resulted in their being repealed.
Mr Sawang also played down media reports on a high number of complaints about suspected violations of Senate election regulations being received by the EC, saying the number of complaints wasn't high given there are 40,000 candidates. He said the EC is investigating complaints and will take legal action if any prove to be true.
Since the EC's regulation restricting Senate election candidates' self-introduction in public was scrapped as a result of the May 24 ruling, these candidates are free to use votes the way they like, except for buying votes, which is illegal, he said.
"When creating these rules, we aimed to ensure fairness for all candidates. But since the court has ruled to hold the rights and freedom of these candidates [above the purpose of us creating these regulations], we have to follow the ruling," he said.
Asked for a comment on an observation that only those candidates linked to conservative political parties and the reformist Move Forward Party (MFP) will eventually dominate the Upper House, Mr Sawang said: "It's hard to say".
Among the complaints filed with the EC about alleged misconduct in the past two rounds of voting in the Senate election, three were submitted on Wednesday by three well-known candidates over alleged breaches of the election regulations.
They were famed lawyer Sitra Biabangkerd, political activist Sonthiya Sawatdee and Santana Prayoonrat, a former high-ranking police officer.
After submitting his complaint with the EC, Mr Sitra said he had supplied the EC with evidence of collusion to manipulate the voting results by some groups of candidates hired to cast a vote for some specific candidates.
The lawyer won the highest number of votes in the district and provincial rounds conducted in Samut Sakhon and will contest the final national vote next Wednesday. He said he had proof of vote buying and has handed it to the EC.
Mr Sonthiya and Mr Santana won in the district-level vote in Pathumwan district of Bangkok but later were both defeated at the provincial level.
Mr Sonthiya said he also aims to petition either the Supreme Court's Criminal Division for Political Office-Holders or the Constitutional Court against the results of the election, while Mr Santana accused three unnamed major parties of being behind alleged vote buying in the ongoing Senate race.