Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said the Central Election Commission (CEC) would decide on whether to combine the next presidential and legislative elections by the end of June, but he would not reveal his own opinion on the issue.
The premier said that because the commission was the agency in charge of the matter, “it is inconvenient for me to express my views.”
The commission will hold five public hearings starting this month to gauge public opinion on the issue and also solicit the views of major political parties before making a final decision, Wu said.
The presidential poll is scheduled to take place in March next year, while the legislative elections are slated for December or next January.
Combining the two elections has long been considered as a way of eliminating the financial and manpower costs of holding two nationwide elections two or three months apart, and making the process more convenient for voters.
Critics, however, question the potentially long wait a president-elect would have before being formally inaugurated in May if the “two-in-one” election were held late this year or early next year.
The government has also pushed to implement an absentee voting system, but asked if combining the presidential and legislative polls would complicate such a process, Wu said: “The CEC will take all matters into consideration.”
The Ministry of the Interior has said it would be relatively simple to use absentee voting in the presidential election because the candidates listed on ballots would be the same regardless of geographical location.
However, polling stations would have to prepare different ballots and ballot boxes if the system were to be used for legislative elections, in which legislators are directly elected in 73 different electoral districts around the country.
Following reports of an imminent move by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on the possibility of merging the two elections, KMT Culture and Communication Committee Director Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) yesterday said the party discussions on the matter had so far only involved academics and organization officers and that the party has not finalized its stance.
Media reports have said that senior KMT officials are leaning toward a combined election.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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