If voting day were tomorrow, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) would lead her main rival, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), by 2.1 percentage points, a poll by the Taiwan Brain Trust showed yesterday.
According to the survey, DPP Chairperson Tsai and her running mate, DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), would obtain 40.4 percent of the vote, against Ma and Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) at 38.3, while People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) and his vice presidential candidate, Lin Ruey-shiung (林瑞雄), would garner 7.3 percent.
The poll showed that 86.7 percent of eligible voters intended to vote in next month’s elections.
However, in terms of their expectations of the outcome on Jan. 14, only 30.4 percent of respondents said the Tsai-Su ticket would win, against 43.1 percent who said the Ma-Wu pairing would win, which highlights a lack of confidence in the DPP ticket’s chances in the election.
Chen Jin-ji (陳錦稷), head of the Taiwan Brain Trust Poll Research Center, said the recent war of words between the KMT and DPP over the Yu Chang Biologics Co case had created concerns among voters of government intervention in the elections, with 42.8 percent of respondents saying the KMT was using administrative resources to benefit Ma, against 35 percent who believed this was not the case.
Slightly more than 43 percent said the judicial system was intervening in the elections and there was an issue of selective investigation of cases, while 35.4 felt the opposite.
In terms of votes for parties, Chen said 37.1 percent of respondents supported the KMT, 32.8 percent supported the DPP, 0.9 percent supported the New Party, 4.3 percent supported the PFP and 19.1 percent did not know or refused to answer.
The poll was conducted on Friday and Saturday, using home phone numbers from Chunghwa Telecom as the basis to poll adult voters in Taiwan, with 1,071 valid responses and a confidence rate of 95 percent.
The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percent.
Commenting on recent polls, Soong said he often came in first in Internet polling and called on the media to pay more attention to such means of polling.
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