Taiwan's primary color still black

The next legislative and local government head elections are still eight months away, but each political party has started its nomination process. Although the People First Party and the New Party do not have their nomination plans ready yet, both the DPP and the KMT are using party primaries in their nomination systems. The DPP faces severe disputes over its primaries amid rumors of candidates' vote-buying. The KMT is busy negotiating with its candidates, due to the tense competition among them for the primaries.

Ever since the DPP passed its internal regulations for nomination of candidates for public offices (公職候選人提名辦法) in 1989, it has basically followed the principle of negotiation before primaries. Thus, the party's branch offices first try to come up with nominees in accordance with the principle of local autonomy. A local primary is held only when agreement cannot be reached.

The regulations have been modified 11 times since 1989 -- before almost every major election -- in order to adjust the party's primary system. In the past 12 years the DPP has repeatedly modified its primary system -- from one under which candidates were directly decided by party members, representatives, cadres, open primaries for all eligible voters or opinion polls -- in order to end manipulation by party factions, reduce the negative influence of so-called "nominal" party members (人頭黨員) or "pocket" party members (口袋黨員) and stop rampant vote-buying.

Judging from this year's primaries, however, the system has failed to stop corruption in the primaries and the vote-buying practices are worsening -- despite the fact that the proportion of party members' votes required for nomination has been lowered to 30 percent while the proportion of opinion polls has been raised to 70 percent.

The biggest problem in this year's primaries may lie in the design in which both the nominees for "legislators at large" (全國不分區) and overseas legislators are voted for only by party members. Since every party member is allowed to cast five ballots in the primaries -- three for legislator-at-large candidates, one for overseas candidates and one for regular candidates running in geographic constituencies -- many legislator-at-large candidates exchange votes with each other, leading to chaos. As for regular candidates, their disparity in opinion polls -- except for some political stars with high name recognition -- might be narrow. Consequently, party members' votes cannot be ignored and so buying and exchanging votes are inevitable.

When facing the poor primaries, besides hoping that the DPP will aggressively attack vote-buying practices, some also suggest that opinion polls be added to the selection of legislator-at- large and overseas legislator nominees. Some even suggest amendments to the Public Officials Elections and Recall Law (公職人員選舉罷免法) or primary ballots to be held by the government, as well as declaring an election invalid once the elected politicians are involved in the practices of vote-buying, in order to purify the primaries.

Under Taiwan's unique election system and culture, although holding a primary is considered a democratic way for a party to decide its nominees, the design has its congenital defects. In fact, not too many Western political parties hold party primaries, not to mention the unique Taiwan twist of deciding nominees by opinion poll results. Apart from the Taiwanese people's blind faith in opinion polls, this situation also reflects the predicament facing parties under a poor election culture. The question is, can the difficulties really be solved by over-emphasizing the importance of opinion polls? A deeper concern is than if opinion polls continue to play a key role, forging a more responsible and more mature system of party politics in Taiwan will remain remote.