The legislature yesterday passed an amendment to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law (
If a political party has difficulty appointing a representative, the responsibility of assigning a representative to each polling station then falls on the party's presidential candidate, the amendment states.
The current regulation stipulates that poll inspectors in a national election be recommended by political parties on a pro rata basis.
Political parties then can decide which polling station they want their inspector to be stationed at. If the number of inspectors assigned by parties to a particular polling station is higher than what the station needs, the final list of representatives is decided through drawing.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) said that the amendment was aimed at preventing situations in which voting inspectors at some polling stations turn out to be members of the same political party.
"If a majority of inspectors at a polling station is from a specific party, it could influence the fairness of the elections," Wu said.
Wu said that the KMT introduced the amendment because most voting inspectors in the last presidential election in 2004 tended to favor the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and therefore counted "disputed ballots" as votes for the DPP.
In related news, lawmakers yesterday agreed to make a budget bill for this fiscal year concerning state-owned enterprises and governmental nonprofit funds and a special budget bill for public construction projects as the first two bills up for review in today's plenary session.
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