Sun, May 09, 2004 page8

• Ah, but who made it so hard to vote?

  • By Dave Lindorff
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  As the battle over the razor-thin re-election won by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) continues, there is at least one grand irony in the charges being leveled by the losers, the pan-blue alliance.

  The pan-blues have, among other things, charged that Taiwanese soldiers were prevented from voting because of a heightened state of alert ordered by the government on the afternoon of March 19, following the shooting of Chen and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮).

  While there is an ongoing debate over whether more than a few thousand additional troops were kept on base and prevented from returning home to vote, the issue is controversial because the Chen/Lu ticket won by fewer than 30,000 votes. The pan-blue camp also charges that many soldiers were kept on base deliberately to keep them from voting, and that most soldiers would have voted for the pan-blue ticket.

  One may dispute how many additional troops were actually prevented from voting because the heightened alert, and what percentage of those disenfranchised soldiers and sailors would have voted for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) ticket, and even whether the heightened alert was justified or not. What has not been mentioned in all this debating, however, is the question of why soldiers on duty in Taiwan on an election day are prevented from voting in the first place.

  In most democratic countries, this problem would never have arisen because there are procedures in place for absentee voting, and for changing one's registered residence for voting.

  In the US, for instance, every state has a mail-in ballot option to make it easy for people who are traveling for work or school, are handicapped or hospitalized, or simply are at work while the polls are open, to cast a vote.

  The procedure is simple: A qualified voter simply requests a ballot in writing from his county voter registrar. After the request is checked to make sure the requester is duly registered to vote, a ballot is mailed, along with two envelopes. The voter fills out the ballot, which is put into an unmarked envelope to maintain anonymity, and that envelope, which is opened and counted on election day, is mailed in the second larger envelope, which has the voter's identification, to be logged into the system to prevent the person from voting twice.

  It is also easy in many democratic countries for citizens to transfer their voting registration from one jurisdiction to another with the signing of a form.

  Students, for example, can easily register to vote in the town where they go to college, and soldiers can re-register in the town where they are stationed, so they don't have to rush home to vote on election day.

  If Taiwan had such a system, many more people, including soldiers and citizens working, studying or traveling overseas, would be able to vote.

  Certainly there are arguments against absentee ballots. In a society where vote-buying is still a problem, mail-in ballots could facilitate the process by making it easier for the vote-buyer to ensure that the voters he bribes actually cast their votes the way he wants. Still, the benefits of making voting easier should outweigh corruption.

  The irony in all this is that the election law that bars absentee balloting and that makes it so difficult for Taiwanese voters, including soldiers, to re-register in the place they are currently living, was passed way back in 1995 by -- guess who? -- "the then-ruling KMT [which at that time included the PFP]. So the people who are now crying foul really have only themselves to blame.

  Actually, I suspect that the KMT, which tends to be supported more among the business class and the more well-off in Taiwanese society, probably likes things this way. It is likely that the vast majority of those several hundred thousand voters who had enough money and free time to fly all the way to Taiwan from abroad just in order to cast their votes were pro-pan blue.

  If those who had less money and time for such a trip -- overseas students, for example -- had been able to vote by mail, the pan blue overseas advantage probably would have been considerably less.

  Dave Lindorff is a Fulbright senior scholar in residence at National Sun Yat-sen University.
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