The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday criticized the government’s proposal to introduce absentee voting, accusing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of planning the system to manipulate elections.
Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said on Wednesday that his ministry was studying the option of allowing absentee voting and would start with a transfer system to allow voters to cast their ballots in the constituencies where they work rather than where their residency is registered.
TIME-FRAME
The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) said voters within Taiwan would be able to cast their votes away from their registered home addresses as early as the year-end local elections.
Currently, voters can only turn in ballots at designated polling stations near their registered home, preventing many from voting.
PUBLIC CONCERN
DPP spokesman Chuang Shuo-han (莊碩漢) told a press conference yesterday that while the previous KMT government had mentioned absentee voting in the past, it had not implemented it out of concern for public opinion.
It is suspicious that the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) now hopes to introduce absentee voting yet has not held cross-party negotiations or gauged public opinion on the matter, he said.
‘CHEAT’
Chuang said the DPP believed the KMT could take advantage of the changes “to cheat in elections perhaps.”
Any discussion of introducing absentee voting is premature, he said, because the government can not promise the elections would be fair.
Additional reporting by CNA and staff writer
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