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EDITORIAL: A case for absentee voting

Nothing better betrays a politician trying to line his or her pockets than complaining bitterly about a problem and blaming it on political foes -- but doing absolutely nothing about it.

Over the last few national elections, members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have peddled conspiracy theories on members of the armed forces having their right to vote infringed upon by partisan elements in the military command.

No evidence of this was ever furnished -- hardly surprising -- but it was nonetheless disappointing that the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government neglected to take the issue to the next level and fix the problem for good by installing a system of domestic absentee voting.

Mature democracies all over the world provide for an absentee ballot for voters who cannot be in their electoral district on the day of an election. This option reflects the reality of modern life: Professional and recreational mobility and emergency services are part of the way we live. It is ridiculous to punish voters and lessen the representativeness of an electoral result by not offering an absentee ballot option.

Taiwan's electoral system requires voters to physically return to the place where they are registered as resident before they can vote. This colonial residue of social control in the Japanese and KMT White Terror eras is pointless and should be ditched.

But there are other reasons why the present arrangement is absurd. It discriminates against police, the military and other essential services whose members do not necessarily have the option of returning home to vote. It discriminates against anyone who must pay significant sums of money to return "home." It discriminates against rural areas, which are short-changed by having their absent voters silenced.

And given the prevalence of vote-buying, the system in effect discriminates in favor of voters in rural and remote areas who have to demonstrate by surreptitious means that their vote has not only been bought but also delivered.

The introduction of an absentee ballot would add a degree of complexity to the counting of votes. But such complexity is part and parcel of democratic mechanisms in other countries and should pose no challenge to a system as transparent as Taiwan's electoral mechanism.

This is a non-partisan issue. Even so, it is odd that the DPP should have pushed so hard to introduce electoral reform -- downsizing the legislature, redrawing electoral boundaries and limiting electorates to one legislator -- that was against its medium-term legislative interests, while at the same time showing little interest in empowering the arguably larger number of DPP voters who move to the metropolis from their rural base and do not or cannot return to vote.

The KMT, for its part, could gain some credibility as custodian of an adolescent democratic system by taking this matter seriously and moving to scrap this dinosaur-like restriction. Unfortunately, with the KMT dominating the legislature and a KMT member likely to be in the Presidential Office, it is difficult to see where the impetus for change might come from.
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