MOI to amend law to allow parties to field joint tickets

As current regulations do not indicate whether multiple parties may file a joint ticket for the presidential election, Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) announced yesterday that his department would amend regulations to state clearly that they may do so.

If it becomes law, the amendment would shape the 2004 presidential election as a competition between the pan-blue camp and pan-green camp.

"We are planning to amend the current regulations to allow different political parties to join forces and file a joint ticket for the presidential election," Yu said in a meeting of the legislature's Home and Nations Committee yesterday.

He was responding to PFP lawmaker Lee Ching-hua's (李慶華) question on whether the government plans to obstruct the cooperation of the PFP and the KMT.

The planned amendment would be made to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law (總統副總統選舉罷免法).

"We don't yet have a clear idea of what form the amendment will take, but we will be holding public meetings to discuss this," Yu said.

Despite the fact that the two major opposition parties, the KMT and the PFP, have yet to set up a timetable for selecting a joint candidate for the 2004 presidential election, the two parties have vowed in a joint press conference on Friday to cooperate for the election.

However, whether parties could legally field such a joint candidate has been a controversial point and current regulations are not clear over the issue.

Article 22 of the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law (總統副總統選舉罷免法), only states that political parties can nominate only one president-and-vice-president team for the presidential elections.

During last year's local-government election campaign, the Central Election Commission ruled -- under regulations governing local-government elections which state that parties may only nominate their own members as candidates -- that single candidates jointly endorsed by more than one party could not be fielded. Some have held that the same principle should apply to presidential and vice-presidential nominees.

In the case of presidential elections, while the parties have been entitled to nominate non-members since a regulation forbidding them to do so was repealed in 1999, the law does not state whether multiple parties may nominate joint-ticket presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

The repeal allowed independent writer Li Ao (李敖) to run as the New party's presidential candidate for the 2000 presidential election.

Yu also pointed out that Article 39 and Article 41 of the law might require changes before the amendment could be implemented.