As the countdown begins for the year-end election, the Ministry of Justice has launched a major campaign to crack down on vote-buying. At moments like these, when the ministry enjoys tremendous public backing for a long-overdue campaign, it must be reminded to keep a cool head to avoid the potential traps of losing sight of its real purpose and allowing the end to justify the means.
The importance of and need to crackdown on vote-buying cannot be emphasized enough. In particular, this year-end election will essentially be a showdown between the DPP and the KMT for a legislative majority and the right to head the Cabinet. As the race is expected to be a close one, the KMT mustn't be allowed to continue its past practice of vote-buying.
As a result of a combination of many factors, the Chen Shui-bian (
However, the size of the challenges facing the justice ministry cannot be overstated. Vote-buying has become a deeply ingrained practice in election culture in Taiwan. A lot of it, of course, has to do with the "Chinese KMT's" historical need to secure its rule in Taiwan where Taiwanese made up 80 percent of the population. Vote-buying became the practice when only local elections were open for direct voting, but the practice has continued until today.
Complicating the situation is the Taiwanese culture's tradition of gift-giving. Giving gifts has become an art involving sophisticated rules about what, when, and whom to give gifts to. Gifts are given on special holidays such as the Mid-Autumn Festival and Teacher's Days to individuals including supervisors, teachers, and so on, without any demand or expectation for immediate and tangible returns, unless one counts general goodwill.
In contrast, vote-buying exists when money or something of monetary value is given in exchange for votes. In other words, a bargain is struck. But a list of 17 types of suspect conduct announced by Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (
The ingenuity of lawbreakers in inventing new ways of buying votes will probably enable them to circumvent the list easily. The only way to avoid this is to focus on the core of the forbidden conduct, that is, the "exchange."
The telecommunication and banking industries have also been mobilized to stand by during investigations for full cooperation with the justice ministry. This raises concerns about potential violations of people's right to privacy through wiretapping and surveillance of banking records against a backdrop of governmental enthusiasm to crack down successfully on vote buying. While eradicating the practice is certainly a top priority, the Chen administration should not forget that the protection of privacy is no less important to a government elected on a platform advocating respect for human rights than a crackdown on "black gold." During the investigations, the justice ministry must ensure that legal due process is followed and the level of intrusion on privacy narrowly confined.
Unless the ministry takes pain to avoid these traps, it risks seeing all its hard work wasted as the campaign degenerates into accusation and counter accusation about the violations of citizens rights. The ministry therefore needs to strike hard, but with surgical precision if it is to see its campaign succeed.
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