Tainan County KMT candidate demands poll investigation

A KMT legislative candidate in Tainan County has asked the Tainan District Court for an investigation into vote-tampering, which he believes caused him to lose his re-election bid by 58 votes on Saturday.

Hung Yuh-chin (洪玉欽) claims that he was 100 votes ahead of the DPP's Hou Shui-sheng (侯水盛) until Jenteh township made a revision to its vote-count results after those results had already been reported to the Central Election Commission. Hung ended up finishing 12th in the race.

Hou was elected with 35,876 votes, the smallest number of votes among the eight county winners. Hung finished with 35,818 votes.

Hung filed a complaint with the Tainan District Prosecutors' Office on Saturday night, accusing the county's election commission of forgery. Hung went to the Tainan District Court at around 2am yesterday morning and applied for the court seizure of ballots at a polling station in Jenteh Township.

The court has issued an order to seize all the votes cast in the entire county for the legislative election.

Tainan County's election commission said the correction resulted from an earlier mistake in the vote count and did not involve any impropriety.

Before Saturday's elections, the Ministry of Justice had received reports of more than 2,000 alleged irregularities, leading to 15 vote-buying cases.

The Ministry of Justice had also dispatched prosecutors to watch for suspicious transfers of money to 100 banks nationwide, especially credit unions commonly used for providing cash for vote buying.