Campaigning for the Nov. 29 elections is beginning to pick up steam and members of the public are also getting excited about the nine-in-one elections, the biggest in the nation’s history in terms of the numbers of seats up for grabs.
According to the Central Election Commission (CEC), a record-high 11,130 public servants are to be chosen from about 20,000 hopefuls nationwide who have registered their candidacies for seats including mayors and councilors of the five special municipalities; commissioners and mayors of 16 counties and cities; and municipal, county and city councilors; township mayors; and borough and village wardens.
As the elections are expected to be contested more fiercely than ever, a civic group hoping to ensure fair vote tallies recently asked the CEC whether members of the public could film the vote-counting process with devices such as their smartphones from the polling stations’ observation areas.
The reply from the CEC baffled many.
The government agency in charge of elections’ administrative affairs said that would not be allowed because filming is banned during the vote-counting process to maintain order at polling stations.
The agency added that if it allowed onlookers at the polling stations to film the counting of votes, it could unintentionally “provide vote-buyers with an opportunity to check on their vote-buying results” and therefore end up encouraging such offenses.
However, the CEC’s reasoning is unconvincing.
The Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) stipulates that video and camera devices are banned from “voting stations in order to protect people’s right to secret ballots.”
This prohibition is more than reasonable, because allowing filming or photography at the voting stations could end up serving people involved in “mobilizing” votes and become a way for them to — in the CEC’s words — “check their vote-buying results.”
However, vote tallying is a different matter entirely.
Because votes are cast by secret ballot, there is no way for a photograph or video to link a voter’s identity to a vote tallied during the vote-counting process at any polling station.
In other words, the CEC’s concern about providing vote-buyers “an opportunity to check on their vote-buying result” is a nonissue.
As for its other reason — “maintaining poll station order” — one has to ask how in the world could a person interfere with the polling station’s count simply by filming the process on the sidelines from the onlookers’ area?
The nation has seen cases of foul play during the tallying of votes.
One notorious case was during the 1992 legislative election in Hualien, when then-Democratic Progressive Party legislative candidate Huang Hsin-chieh (黃信介) was defeated by 62 votes, only to find out later that due to some sort of dirty trick, an extra 300 ballots had been cast for a district that had only about 500 eligible voters.
There have also been other cases of “bizarre incidents,” such as the “coincidence” of having electrical blackouts at polling stations during vote counts or a bag of ballots in favor of a specific candidate being discovered long after votes were counted.
As such, the CEC’s prohibition of filming during the vote count only fuels public suspicion and leads voters to wonder whether the government has something to hide.
Otherwise, why would it reject making the tallying of votes more transparent and derail a chance to allow broader citizen participation in the nation’s democracy?
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