Many candidates aspiring to take part in the Nov. 27 elections chose yesterday — a lunar calendar day widely believed to be auspicious for important activities — to register their candidacies.
Reeling from the recent pricing scandal on an overpass beautification project and the upcoming Taipei International Flora Expo, incumbent Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) signed his registration papers alongside former KMT chairperson Wu Po-hsiung (吳伯雄).
“I must win and I will win,” he told supporters after completing the registration procedure at the Taipei City Election Commission.
PHOTO: CNA
Hours earlier, his election opponent, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), registered his candidacy under the watchful eyes of his wife, Chan Hsiu-ling (詹秀齡), and former DPP chairperson Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) amid chants of “Get elected, get elected” from his supporters.
While Su admitted he picked an auspicious time to register, Hau said he did not and believed that any time picked by a hard-working individual was a good time.
Su said that if he wins, he would spend his four-year term working to “stem the practice of waste, weed out malpractice, pursue the benefits of the people and improve efficiency.”
In Greater Taichung, the KMT’s Taichung mayoral candidate, incumbent Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強), registered his candidacy 30 minutes after the DPP’s Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) did. Both incumbent Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) of the DPP and Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) of the KMT also chose yesterday to register their candidacies in the race for the southern municipality that will be a merger of Kaohsiung city and county.
Much fanfare is expected this morning at the Central Election Commission (CEC) as both the KMT and DPP’s mayoral hopefuls for the municipality that will become Sinbei City are slated to register their candidacies.
KMT candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) is expected to cycle from his election headquarters to the election commission in Jhonghe (中和) at 11am.
DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) election campaign also revealed that she would lead a group of about 60 bicycles from Banciao (板橋) at 9:30am and arrive at the election commission an hour before her election opponent.
The focus of the registrations — which have so far progressed without any big surprises — will be on Tainan City, where incumbent Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair of the DPP has hinted he could make an independent run after being upset at the party primaries in May.
The KMT’s Tainan candidate Kuo Tien-Tsai (郭添財) and his DPP counterpart William Lai (賴清德) already completed their candidacy registrations on Monday, the first of the five-day registration period.
A draw will be held by the CEC on Oct. 29 to determine the ballot number of the candidates running in the mayoral elections and the final poll will take place from 8am to 4pm on Nov. 27.
In other developments, the DPP’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs director Icyang Parod yesterday submitted his application written in his native Amis language for the Sinbei city councilor race. However, the Taipei County Election Commission only took his application after Icyang agreed to attach a Chinese translation to the application.
The election commission officials said they would have to ask the CEC if they could list both Chinese and Amis on the election gazette as Icyang had requested.
“Taiwan’s Aborigine tribes have had their own official writing system since November 2005 when the Ministry of Education and the Council of Indigenous Peoples jointly released a set of standard Aboriginal writing systems,” Icyang said. “Hence, the election commission has no reason to reject my application written in Amis or to refuse to list my campaign agenda in Amis in the election gazette.”
When reached for comment, CEC secretary-general Teng Tien-yu (鄧天祐) said there was no particular rule on whether information on the election gazette could be written in a language other than Chinese. Adding there was no precedence either, Teng said the CEC would decide what to do after it receives the application.
Additional reporting by Ko Shu-ling and CNA
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