A recent Taipei Times news article that was headlined "Strategic voting won't work" (Nov. 29, Page 3) offers a good analysis of the current election campaign. However, I'm a little confused about the composition of Taiwan's population. According to the news article, the Taiwanese are 75 percent "Taiwanese," 15 percent mainlanders, 11 percent Hakka and 1 percent Aboriginals. First, that's a total of 102 percent. Second, the article states that "mainlanders" are those who came to Taiwan after 1945, but he does not explain why Hakka and Aboriginals are not counted as "Taiwanese." I feel the term "Taiwanese" may be too ambiguous here. Perhaps "Hokkien" (Fukienese?) or "Hokkien-speaking" would be better. In Canada, people face similar problems and have adopted different terms to describe different groups of Canadians. In addition to the traditional "Anglophone" and "Francophone," there are also "English-speaking," which includes those who are not Anglo-saxon in origin, "Allophone," which refers to people whose first language is neither English nor French, etc. The article says that "strategic voting" may take place when several candidates compete for one position. Actually, another condition also contributes to the need for strategic voting, that is, when the voters can make only one choice. If the voters can make more than one choice, things can be very different. For example, in Australia, voters can make more than one choice on the ballot. If their first choice does not produce a winner of the majority of votes, the votes of those voters whose first-choice candidates are dropped will be transferred to other candidates according to their second choices. In France, if no one wins a majority of votes in the first ballot, a second ballot -- a run-off -- will be held between the top candidates. In both cases, the final winner is someone who wins more than 50 percent of the votes rather than simply a plurality of votes.
David Ding
British Columbia, Canada
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