NRSA member Wanchai Sornsiri said yesterday that if necessary, the agency should be reset back to square one. He said some commission members were fighting one another for a position in the agency and as the election is approaching, the EC should not be tangled up with such issues.

“The Election Commission is the hope in holding an election. If the commissioners are fighting, how can we be hopeful that the next election will be orderly?” Wanchai said.

Another NRSA member, Amnuay Nimmano, said that while some EC commissioners had shown an ambition to chair the agency, he believed they could still work |together.

Seree Suwannapanont, chairman of the NRSA’s political reform committee, said the committee would discuss the matter with the Constitution Drafting Commission (CDC) tomorrow.

Shortly after the referendum last month, news circulated that there was conflict among the EC’s five commissioners. Some of them are reportedly unhappy with EC president Supachai Somcharoen’s role and called on him to resign. Supachai refused to comply.

He said he was not sure that resigning from the president’s chair would require him to resign from the EC. Stepping down would cause difficulties, he said, as the National Council for Peace and Order |currently forbade the recruitment of independent agency commissioners.

CDC chairman Meechai Ruchupan said he had only heard from news reports the NRSA’s suggestions about independent |agencies but he had not acknowledged them.

Meechai said that when writing organic laws involving political parties and elections, the drafters would only heed opinions from related |parties, he added.

He said any changes to the agencies following the constitution, such as increasing the number of the commissioners, would be written carefully in the organic laws. He added that the drafters had not yet discussed how to write them.