The delegates elected to the National Assembly should toe the lines of their political parties or their representative groups when they meet on May 30 to consider a constitutional amendment package, the head of the Central Election Commission (CEC) said yesterday.
CEC Chairman Chang Cheng-hsiung (
Chang was responding to questions about his views on the request by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to overturn a portion of a newly passed bill governing the operation of the National Assembly, so that the requirement for passage of the constitutional amendment package will be slashed from three-quarters of the assembly to a simple majority.
Chang made the remarks while delivering the National Assembly election certificates to the DPP headquarters, which were received by DPP Secretary-General Lee Yi-yang (
Lee said a day earlier that the party has always supported a simple majority, and only went along with the high three-quarters threshold last week because it wanted to pass the law as quickly as possible.
The DPP has 127 seats in the National Assembly, while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has 117 seats. With both parties sticking to their guns in favor of passing the constitutional amendment package, the seats among them seem to ensure the passage of the package.
But the high threshold of three-quarters did throw some uncertainty into the probability of passing the constitutional amendment package adopted by the Legislative Yuan last August as invalid votes will also be counted as opposition votes.
Items of the package include reducing the number of legislative seats from the present 225 to 113 and adopting a "single seat, two votes" legislative electoral system starting with the legislature to be elected in 2007, as well as phasing out the National Assembly to allow for popular referendums on future constitutional amendments.
Chang said that some have said that the delegates are like representatives of the electoral college in the presidential election of the US, which are supposed to vote in line with the party or group's views, and there should not be any problem of not following the party's stance or invalid ballots.
Chang said that the law governing the operation of the National Assembly had not cleared the Legislative Yuan before the National Assembly elections, and the CEC had to tell the public that those who support or oppose the constitutional amendment package should be treated the same. The current threshold of three-quarters doesn't seem to conform to the original spirit, making three support votes equal to one non-support vote.
With regard to Lee's comment that it was a pity that the turnout was so low -- 23.36 percent -- Chang said the election was as important, if not more important, than a presidential election, but he said that the voters were not aware of the significance.
They were also not familiar with the items in the constitutional amendment package, as well as the unique nature of choosing a party or a group, instead of individual candidates. These all contributed to the low turnout, Chang added.
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