With the High Court expected to deliver its verdict on the legitimacy of the March 20 presidential election next Thursday, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Secretary-General Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) said yesterday that the judges have to date not been able to substantiate the pan-blue camp's claims of major flaws and fraud in the voting process.
Chang said the DPP was confident of a favorable verdict.
"So far all the accusations brought by the pan-blue camp's attorneys against the legitimacy of the presidential election have been proven to be false," Chang told a news conference yesterday afternoon.
Chang said that the number of "controversial ballots" claimed by the pan-blue camp's attorneys was sharply reduced from about 900,000 to about 300,000 after a recount was implemented. He added that no major flaws or any indication of fraud had been found.
It is unavoidable that some faults would creep in during the casting and counting of ballots due to human error, "but for the opposition parties to say those imperfections are proof of cheating is going too far," Chang said.
One of the accusations singled out by the pan-blue camp's attorneys was that the election workers in Taichung County were suspected of fabricating ballots by using the ballot papers of voters who did not show up at polling stations.
Chang said that the workers who had been subpoenaed by the prosecutors, including representatives from village administrations, school teachers, school nurses and even controllers sent by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), have all denied the claim, saying they neither participated in nor witnessed such actions.
DPP Information and Culture Department Director Cheng Wen-tsan (
Many of the claims were proved to be no more than rumors, Cheng said, adding that the pan-blue camp's claims of election trickery were exactly the same as its accusations that the March 19 assassination attempt on President Chen Shui-bian (
"The DPP has no qualms about the whole process of polling and counting ballots. We are confident of our legal systems and believe the verdict will be favorable to the DPP and could return justice to all the election workers," Chang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching