ASIA : The ATM Election in Thailand : Vote buying is so prevalent that one kind of bank note is scarce. Corruption and apathy are endemic.

When the last national elections were held in 1992, many Thais felt the victory of a pro-reform coalition government meant that the old, corrupt ways of Thai politics had come to an end.

Judging by the six-week campaign that formally ends today, that assessment may have been a little hasty.

In fact, Prateep Ungsongtham, leader of a human rights group known as the Confederation for Democracy, concluded that the campaign has been the “worst and dirtiest” she has ever experienced. Vote buying--a classic tactic used by old-style politicians to secure a presence in Parliament--is now taken for granted in many parts of the country, she said.

The theme of this year’s election might be termed disillusionment with reform. Many of the voters who turned out in 1992 to support democratic reforms are experiencing a letdown because many of the country’s problems, such as traffic and pollution, have not been solved by the reformers.

One result of this disillusionment is apathy: Polls have indicated that turnout in Sunday’s balloting for the 391 seats in the lower house of Parliament will be the lowest in many years. But the real concern is that politicians lacking a powerful issue will resort to buying the election outright.

“There is no question that in some areas, money is the decisive factor in the election,” said Gothom Arya, an engineering professor and head of Pollwatch, an independent agency charged with monitoring the campaign.

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Thailand’s election laws officially limit each candidate to spending $40,000. The Interior Ministry apparently makes no effort to enforce them, however, and Gothom estimated that each candidate this year needed about $200,000 to mount a serious campaign.

Why are politicians here so keen to buy their way into power? One answer is that being a member of the government, especially a Cabinet minister, has proven an easy route to making even more money.

A new study of corruption by two local political scientists notes that Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who died while still in office as prime minister in 1963, amassed a personal fortune worth $100 million during his last three years in power.

Money has changed hands at two key points in this campaign. Soon after Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, leader of the pro-reform Democrat Party, resigned in May after a corruption scandal, politicians with a strong hold on their local constituencies were courted by leaders of rival parties in an effort to encourage them to switch allegiances.

Of the 332 members of the last Parliament who planned to run in this election, 53 changed parties at the beginning of the campaign. Candidates assured of election could command at least $400,000, according to news reports.

The second round of vote buying has been going on in the slums of Bangkok and remote villages, where party workers buy up entire neighborhoods for a political party. The price of an individual vote is usually small, but the demand is so great that the red 100-baht note, worth $4, has disappeared from banks in many provinces over the last couple of weeks.

Judging by reports in the country’s newspapers, the most aggressive use of political funds has been by the opposition Chart Thai (Thai Nation) party, which has 92 incumbents running for office, the most of any party.

Chart Thai leader Banharn Silapaarcha is so well-known as a dispenser of political cash that he has been dubbed the “walking ATM machine” by the Thai press.

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But Chart Thai is by no means the only party to use money in an effort to influence the outcome of the vote. Even the Palang Dharma, a fundamentalist Buddhist party whose name means Force of Justice, is being ridiculed in the news media as the “Force of Money” party since it was taken over by Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire communications mogul.