How many lawyers does it take to confirm an election?
Taiwan's breathless wait for the answer to that question was answered yesterday after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) alliance submitted their proposals for the manpower they need to conduct a recount of the presidential election ballots.
According to the DPP's proposal, it needs 400 lawyers while the KMT-PFP alliance said that it may need 312 lawyers. However, both parties said that this was just an estimate, and they will almost certainly need to hire more lawyers for the project.
According to an agreement reached during the case's first hearing on April 12, Judge Wu Ching-yuan (
Both proposals said that the parties plan to divide the lawyers into 300 teams. Each team will recount at least 4,000 ballots and it will take about 14 days to recount all the ballots.
KMT-PFP alliance lawyer Hanson Chiang (
"We will hire more lawyers so we can process this a lot faster than we expected," said Chiang.
Another pan-blue lawyer, Lee Yi-kwang (
"We cannot be sure that all of these lawyers can show up every day during the recount, since everybody is so busy and has lots of errands to run every day," said Lee. "That is the main reason why we need more people to help."
The DPP did not have any comment regarding the manpower proposal they submitted yesterday.
In addition, Lee also said that the alliance will follow the Central Election Committee's (CEC) rules identifying invalid ballots. When a controversial ballot is discovered during the recount, the alliance hopes that judges will get involved and decide whether it is an invalid ballot or not.
According to the CEC, currently, it has seven samples of valid ballots and 26 samples of invalid ballots, and the recognition of invalid ballots or valid ballots will follow these 33 samples.
In the meantime, according to an earlier agreement between the DPP and the KMT-PFP alliance, when the recount is carried out at a district court, it must be conducted and overseen by two lawyers (one acting on behalf of each party), a judge, a court clerk, a court record keeper, a court guard and at least two CEC workers.
Details of the exact number of workers necessary for the recount will be discussed during the next hearing, but a court date had not been decided as of press time yesterday.
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