With registration for the November special municipality elections having ended on Friday, the election campaign has now entered a new stage.
A total of 7,917 people registered their candidacies with election authorities. They include 14 candidates for five mayoral positions, 649 people running for 314 councilor spots and 7,254 people are seeking 3,758 borough chief posts.
The “three-in-one” poll will be held simultaneously from 8am to 4pm on Nov. 27 in Taipei City, Taipei County (which will become Sinbei City), Greater Taichung (a merger of Taichung city and county), Greater Tainan (a merger of Tainan city and county) and Greater Kaohsiung (a merger of Kaohsiung city and county).
PHOTO: LIU JUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
According to the Central Election Commission, a draw will be held to decide the candidates’ ballot numbers on Oct. 29. Mayoral candidates will be allowed to give campaign speeches from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26, while candidates for city councilor will give their speeches from Nov. 17 to Nov. 26.
The five special municipality elections are seen as a gauge for the 2012 presidential election.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) expects its candidates to secure mayoral posts for Taipei, Sinbei and Greater Taichung, while victory in a fourth municipality is the best-case scenario.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is confident of at least winning Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung and is also optimistic that its Taipei mayoral candidate, former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), can win.
The DPP also expects its Sinbei mayoral candidate, Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), to win more voter support on election day. The DPP added that it will continue to step up its efforts to raise the profile of its Greater Taichung mayoral candidate Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全).
The KMT is trying hard to reverse the negative impact caused by the Taipei City Government’s recent crises involving the upcoming Taipei International Flora Expo, scheduled to open a week before the elections, and the Xinsheng Overpass reconstruction project.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who doubles as the KMT’s chairman, on Friday promised that he would devote more effort to the party’s campaigns.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Chinese-language China Times in Kaohsiung City, 46 percent of potential voters said they support incumbent Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) of the DPP and 63 percent of respondents also said they believed Chen would be re-elected.
In the survey, which polled 1,006 respondents from Monday to Wednesday, 20 percent expressed their support for Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興), who broke away from the DPP earlier last month to run as an independent candidate. Meanwhile, 15 percent voiced their support for the KMT’s Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順).
About 19 percent of respondents declined to reveal for whom they would vote.
Few believed that Yang or Huang would be able to win. About 8 percent of respondents said that Yang was going to win the race, while only 4 percent were confident about Huang’s victory.
Political observers said it was worth noting that among pan-blue voters, only 45 percent said they would vote for Huang, while 28 percent said they would vote for Yang and 13 percent supported Chen.
In the survey, 83 percent said they would cast their ballots on election day, while 10 percent said they may vote, with the remainder saying they would stay home and not vote.
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