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Pan-blues postpone decision on strategy

Depending on which paper you read yesterday, the People First Party (PFP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) either have or have not already reached a decision to allocate votes across party lines.

With only two weeks left until the legislative elections, whether the pan-blue camp will allocate votes either within or across party lines has been an issue of hot debate for candidates and pan-blue supporters alike. But how to describe the results of Friday's closed-door meeting between KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) was an open question for the media yesterday.

next week

The PFP and the KMT said that they were postponing a decision on a cross-party vote allocation strategy until next week, when voter tendencies have become clearer. Until then, the two camps said, each party was going to work on campaigning in these last two weeks before the Dec. 11 legislative elections, making a final push for their weaker candidates and consolidating support for their stronger candidates.

The vote allocation issue became a subject of controversy between the two allies last month, when the KMT announced it would be utilizing a vote allocation strategy only among its own candidates. The news was poorly received by PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), who criticized the KMT for not being a team player in the pan-blue camp's cooperative effort to win a majority of seats in the Dec. 11 legislative elections.

Soong's criticisms have since died down. But even after Friday's meeting between the KMT and PFP chiefs, the issue of whether to initiate cross-party vote allocation strategies remains an open one.

Some KMT offices have decided to get a running start on allocation strategies in their districts, without waiting for the KMT's headquarters to make a final decision on whether to allocate votes between the PFP and the KMT.

"We are putting the concerns of Pingtung County first," Chu Chuen-chuan (朱春泉), executive director of the KMT's district office in Pingtung, said Friday night.

Pingtung County's local KMT division was one of the first district offices to make public a voting allocation strategy for the district's pan-blue supporters last week. In Pingtung County, explained Chu, the KMT is asking supporters who are still undecided about which of the district's two KMT candidates to support to vote along gender lines.

"We want females to vote for the female candidate Lu Hsiu-yen (盧秀燕), and males to vote for the male candidate, Wu Chin-lin (伍錦霖)," Chu said.

Other districts in which the KMT has already set up vote allocation plans include Kaohsiung County and Miaoli County, said Liao Feng-te (廖風德), Director of the KMT's Organization and Development Committee. Liao said the KMT is looking to allocate votes in a total of 13 districts.

While the KMT is making vote allocation strategies for its own candidates its number one priority, the PFP seems to be holding on to the hope that the KMT will agree to cooperate in eight key districts: Kaohsiung and Chiayi cities, as well as Tainan, Nantou, Ilan, Hualien, Taitung and Lienchan counties.

"In particular, [the KMT and PFP] have a tacit understanding to allocate votes in Kaohsiung City, Tainan County, Ilan County, and Nantou County," said PFP spokesman Hsieh Kong-ping (謝公秉) on Friday, after accompanying Soong to his meeting with the KMT.

The PFP's intra-party vote allocation plans for their own candidates are as yet undetermined, Hsieh said.

When questioned by the Taipei Times, both KMT spokesman Chang Jung-kung (張榮恭) and Liao said there was no such understanding to allocate votes in the eight districts between the two parties.

"Nothing has been finalized yet," Chang said on Friday.

"There is no such situation," Liao said yesterday.

Given the PFP and KMT's conflicting takes on the issue, one member of the pan-blue camp has decided to completely eschew vote-allocation plans altogether.

New Party

"The New Party has made it clear from the beginning that it is only running its candidates under the KMT banner in order to increase the number of at-large candidates that the KMT is allocated," New Party Chairman Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) told the Taipei Times on Tuesday. "We are running the campaigns of our legislative candidates separately from those of the PFP and the KMT, and we are not participating in any vote allocation plans."

The New Party is just asking its supporters to vote for New Party candidates, without consideration for the KMT or PFP. If things go as well as polls indicate, Yok said he expects that the New Party will be able to win four or five seats in this year's elections.

While vote allocation plans are difficult in general, cross-party vote allocation is virtually impossible, said Yok, speaking from the New Party's experience as the pioneer of the vote allocation system.

While the DPP is best known for effective utilization of vote allocation strategies, such strategies actually began with the New Party's successful vote-sharing plan that got three of its candidates elected in Taipei City's south district in 1995.

many candidates

"In general, for vote allocation to succeed, you need to first enlarge your voter base in a district, and second, make sure that you have a suitable proportion of candidates to voters there," Yok said. He said that part of the reason the pan-blue camp has been unable to decide on vote allocation in certain areas -- such as Taipei's north and south districts -- is the high number of PFP and KMT candidates.

Furthermore, Yok said, cross-party vote allocation is even more difficult.

"While among the blue camp you do have general pan-blue supporters, each party still has its own loyal following," Yok said. "Voters have independent wills; you can't tell a KMT supporter to vote for a PFP candidate."

Yok urged each party within the pan-blue alliance to "take care of its own," adding that cross-party vote allocation will only confuse voters, create chaos and ultimately cost the pan-blue camp a majority of seats in the elections.

DPP legislative caucus whip Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) concurred, saying yesterday that the pan-blue camp's vote allocation strategies were doomed to failure.

"The New Party, KMT and PFP each has its own sly intentions, so the level of difficulty in allocating votes is high," Tsai said. "Furthermore, the pan-blue camp has had no history of vote allocation, so executing an allocation strategy will be difficult," Tsai said.

Given the pan-blues' lack of experience in working together on an election and that many candidates have already refused to cooperate, vote allocation among the New Party, PFP and KMT is a losing strategy, Tsai said.

While the inclination to allocate votes across party lines may vary among the members of the pan-blue camp, all say that the parties are postponing a final decision on whether, where and how to allocate votes.
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