Activists representing several civic groups yesterday questioned whether the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) is in violation of the Constitution, as it requires deposits from election candidates and therefore fails to protect every citizen’s right to run in elections.
Holding banners and signs as they rallied outside the Judicial Yuan in Taipei in the rain, dozens protested the deposit clause in the law as they submitted a request for a constitutional interpretation to the Council of Grand Justices.
“The Constitution protects every citizen’s right to take part in elections both as a voter and a candidate, but the election law puts restrictions on that right and we think that it is unconstitutional,” Taiwan Labour Front secretary-general Son Yu-lian (孫友聯) said. “Restrictions — especially the deposit — could jeopardize Taiwan’s democracy, as it puts politics in the hands of the few.”
He said there is a problem with democracy if candidates need NT$100 million (US$3.3 million) to run for a seat in the legislature and NT$1 billion to run for the presidency.
“The deposit required by law and the high threshold are excluding the disadvantaged from participating in politics,” Son said.
Sung Chia-lun (宋佳倫), who ran for a Taipei City councilor seat for the Green Party Taiwan last year, cited herself as an example.
“For a young person like me, it took me a year of saving to get the NT$200,000 [to pay for a deposit in the city councilor election] and since I only received about 2,000 votes and failed to garner 5 percent of the vote in the district — which is a little over 3,000 votes — the deposit was confiscated,” Sung said. “So I was penalized for running in the election, even though more than 2,000 voters supported me.”
Sung, who is 28 years old, said she understood that the policy may have been created to prevent “troublemakers” who are not sincere from running in elections, “but if the ‘troublemaker’ is rich, it would not be a problem for him or her. It only penalizes the economically disadvantaged.”
Green Party Taiwan spokesman Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) called for a reform of the voting system.
Taiwan has a “single district, two votes” system in legislative elections, in which the voter can cast a vote for a legislative candidate in a district and another vote for a political party.
The candidate who gets the most votes takes the seat, while parties which garner more than 5 percent of the vote get legislator-at-large seats according to the percentage of the vote each party receives.
“This is not fair and it is in violation of the principle that each vote is equal as laid out in the Constitution,” Pan said. “For instance, in the previous legislative election [in 2008], the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] only had a little more than 50 percent of the votes, but it got 75 percent of the seats, while nine other political parties other than the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party together had 10.1 percent of the votes, but none of them are represented in the legislature.”
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:
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