Thu, Mar 27, 2008 page8

• UN referendums trip on threshold

  • By Jerome Keating
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  In any other country, if a referendum were held and 94 percent of those who voted approved it, it would be considered a great success. That is not the case in Taiwan, however, which has unusually high requirements for success.

  For the results of a referendum to be valid, 50 percent of all eligible voters must pick up and cast a ballot in a referendum, and 50 percent of those who cast a ballot must approve it.

  Herein lies the problem. The first big hurdle for the UN referendums, which were held in conjunction with the presidential election, was to garner 50 percent of all eligible voters -- not 50 percent of the voters who cast ballots in the election.

  That meant that since not all eligible voters turned out for the election, the referendum was already in danger of not passing.

  Referendums have various requirements. They may or may not have a prerequisite that voter turnout be a certain percentage of the electorate. The Danish model requires 40 percent of the electorate. In some cases, a referendum can pass simply if the majority of those who vote approve it and there have been cases where a referendum has passed with as little as 8 percent of the electorate voting.

  The Canadian government does not accept referendums as automatically binding; Quebec's referendum to secede from Canada in 1995 required a simple "50 percent plus one" majority. It barely missed the mark and had many worried.

  Taiwan has had six referendums since it began directly electing its president and not one of these has passed. They have all failed, not because the majority of those voting did not approve them, but because an insufficient number of those eligible to vote picked up ballots. This is what happened to the two referendums on applying for UN membership.

  In the referendum proposed by the Democratic Progressive Party, 6,201,677 people cast ballots and 5,529,230 approved the referendum. Another 352,359 people turned it down and 320,088 cast invalid ballots. The approval rate was 94.01 percent. Yet while more than 5.5 million people approved it, the referendum needed more than 8 million voters for the results to be valid.

  A similar defeat was dealt to the UN referendum proposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Its approval rate was 87.27 percent.

  The purpose of referendums is to express the public's opinion, but because of the requirements, the results may be misinterpreted. There may be many reasons why eligible voters did not pick up ballots. Referendums may be used to mobilize voters towards a party's agenda.

  If one party proposes a referendum, the opposition can counter it by encouraging voters not to pick up a ballot. In this way, party voters will not go on record as voting against a given proposition, but they will nevertheless have defeated the referendum simply by denying it sufficient voters.

  In recent polls, more than 80 percent of the public said the nation should have representation at the UN, yet most eligible voters did not pick up ballots in the UN referendums.

  Laws governing referendums must be reformed to ensure that referendums can be employed to gauge public opinion.

  Until that happens, many -- including foreign media -- can easily misinterpret the results of the UN referendums and other plebiscites in Taiwan.

  Jerome Keating is a Taiwan-based writer.
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