A KMT lawmaker said yesterday that most of Taiwan's people support the proposal to allow absentee voting in general elections.
Quoting the results of a public opinion poll conducted by a KMT think tank, Legislator Huang Teh-fu (黃德福) said nearly 65 percent of the respondents gave a thumbs-up to the idea of allowing absentee voting.
"Therefore, I suggest that absentee voting be tried on an experimental basis in the year-end Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections," Huang said at the news conference where the KMT poll results were released.
Huang said 21 democratic countries around the world have adopted absentee voting to protect the voting rights of all of their citizens.
The absentee voting methods implemented by these countries can be grouped into four categories in which absentee voters can either vote by mailing in votes, or by naming a surrogate, or by voting in special polling stations or by casting their ballots at their place of work.
Huang said the government can legislate a temporary statute to regulate absentee voting on an experimental basis in the Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections to be held late this year.
Since the existing Election and Recall Law (選舉罷免法) already allows election workers to cast their ballots at places where their work is located, instead of places where their legal abode is situated, Huang said it won't be difficult to experiment with absentee voting in the year-end elections.
As the Constitution has set forth the voting qualifications for overseas Taiwanese citizens, Huang said that absentee voting rights should be confined to military service members, the police, medical professionals, prison workers and inmates.
"Initial tallies show these specific workers number more than 3 million," Huang said.
He added that Taiwan should adopt absentee voting as early as possible in order to protect these people's civil rights.
Huang said he will come up with a draft of the proposed statute on absentee voting for the upcoming Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections by the end of the month.
According to the recent KMT poll of 1,079 randomly selected adults in Taiwan, 64.8 percent support the adoption of absentee voting, while 23 percent oppose the proposal.
Meanwhile, the survey re-sults also showed that 64.9 percent gave a thumbs-down to the proposal to lower the minimum voting age to 18 years of age, 25.6 percent said they support the proposal, and 9.5 percent would not express their opinion on the issue.
"In view of expanding political participation, we'll continue promoting the proposal to win popular support," Huang said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS