As political parties estimate how many legislative seats they might win in next Saturday’s polls, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has said it hopes to garner 60, while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said it aims to secure 50 in the 113-seat legislature.
The People First Party (PFP), whose chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) is in a three-way presidential race with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the KMT and DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), said it hoped to win up to 13 seats, while the New Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) hoped they could garner three and two seats respectively.
DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said it was very likely that neither the KMT nor the DPP would win more than half of the legislative seats, so the “power map” at the nation’s highest law-making body could change.
In 10 constituencies, pan-blue parties — the KMT, the PFP and the New Party — are locked in a battle for legislative seats. In all but one of the cases, the battle is between the KMT and the PFP, although all three pan-blue parties have nominated a contender in Kinmen.
In the pan-green camp, which includes the DPP and the TSU, the TSU has not nominated any candidates for the regional polls. It simply hopes to win more than 5 percent of the vote to earn two legislator-at-large seats.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) estimated that in the election for the nation’s 13th president and vice president, as well as the eighth Legislative Yuan, there would be 18,090,255 eligible voters, an increase of 768,633 from the 2008 elections.
The majority of the new voters are those who have turned 20 since the last election, while others are naturalized citizens, such as foreign spouses and new immigrants.
CEC officials said each voter will have three ballots: one for president and vice president, one for legislator and one for political party.
The presidential ballot is pink, while the political party ballot is white. The regional legislator ballot is yellow, but “plains Aborigines” will elect their legislators using light blue ballots and “mountain Aborigines” light green ones.
Polling stations will open at 8am and close at 4pm on Saturday. The CEC expects to finish the vote count by 10pm.
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
COGNITIVE WARFARE: Allegations that the documents were proof that the former US envoy tried to smuggle alcohol were designed to manipulate public opinion Leaked documents related to customs clearance procedures for vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) that have been circulating on the Internet appear to be an attempt to manipulate public opinion against the government, a source said on Sunday. A post on online platform Baoliao Commune (爆料公社) on Sunday showed documents it said were evidence that Hsiao had smuggled alcohol through customs with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and said that the documents were part of a 4GB data dump of confidential material acquired by hackers. In a rebuttal, the source said that they were not confidential documents, but rather