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Pan-blue alliance withdraws latest lawsuit over judge

The pan-blue camp yesterday withdrew its lawsuit seeking to have the presidential election declared a fraud. It also filed an agreement to begin a full recount immediately.

"We decided to temporarily withdraw our lawsuit because we do not like the way Taiwan High Court Presiding Judge Ruan Fu-chih (阮富枝) has handled it," said Fuldien Li (李復甸), one of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) alliance's lawyers.

According to the Presidential Election and Recall Law (總統副總統選舉罷免法), the plaintiff must file a lawsuit to declare the election a fraud within 15 days of the Central Election Committee (CEC) announcing the winner. Tomorrow is the last day the alliance could file such a lawsuit.

"We will definitely do it before the deadline," Li said.

He said the KMT-PFP alliance filed its lawsuit on Monday but then decided to withdraw it because Ruan's decisions had made them uncomfortable.

After the lawsuit was filed, Ruan and judges Lin Li-ling (林麗玲) and Huang Feng-tse (黃豐澤) were assigned -- at random -- by the court's computer system.

Li said Ruan called Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊), another alliance lawyer, around 3:37pm on Tuesday to suggest the alliance merge the lawsuit with its other lawsuit seeking to suspend the victory of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮). According to Lin, Ruan said that if the two cases became one, it would be heard by judges Wu Ching-yuan (吳景源), Cheng Chun-hui (鄭純惠) and Teng Yun-chieh (滕允潔), who are hearing the first case.

"We do not feel safe about Ruan and his colleagues hearing the case anymore, so we decided to temporarily stop it," Li said. "When we refile it, the computer system will assign another three judges anyway."

Li said that Ruan also reminded the alliance that it had to submit its agreement on negotiations with the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) lawyers on how to conduct the election recount before the end of the day yesterday, which was the deadline given by Wu during last Friday's first arraignment of the suit he is hearing. Alliance attorney Yu Ta-wei (俞大衛) submitted the agreement around noon yesterday.

"We [the alliance and the DPP] both agreed to examine, review and recount every single ballot," Yu said.

According to Yu, however, the alliance wants all "controversial" ballots to be recognized by the judges but the DPP said that judges' recognition would only be needed when CEC workers have trouble identifying the ballots.

"I think we can work that out during future hearings," Yu said.
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