Kaohsiung District Court yesterday began the recount of about 1,140,000 ballots from December's Kaohsiung mayoral election.
The court staffers, divided into 20 teams, will spend six days taking two shifts every day to recount the ballots, the court said, adding that about 350 police officers will guard the court.
Results of the recount will not be announced until Monday, the court said.
The court was obliged to recount the ballots after it accepted a lawsuit filed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Huang Chun-ying (
Director of the court's administrative tribunal Tu Yu-tou (涂裕斗) said the court accepted the case because the number of invalid ballots -- 6,622 votes -- was considered to be too high and that Chen's margin of victory was so slim.
Taking the presidential election of 2004 as a precedent, there could be approximately five controversial ballots from each of the 839 voting stations in Kaohsiung, Tu said, adding that the number of contentious ballots could outnumber the difference in votes cast for each candidate.
Tu added that the court accepted the case also on the grounds that Huang's camp presented witnesses who said there were irregularities at more than 100 voting stations.
The court would like to end the dispute once and for all by conducting a recount, Tu said.
Huang and Chen's camps sent out volunteers and lawyers to supervise the recount yesterday.
Director of the Kaohsiung City Government's Department of Information Hsiao Yu-cheng (蕭裕正) said on Friday that Chen's attorneys had been fully prepared for any possible outcome and that they were very optimistic about the result of the recount.
Yesterday Huang said that he would respect the result of the recount and promised he would not mobilize supporters to go to the court in a bid to avoid any accusations of interference in the recount.
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