The majority of respondents in a public opinion poll released yesterday supported eliminating the threshold stipulated in the Referendum Act (公民投票法), as well as a simple format for referendum questions to avoid hidden political agendas.
The Taiwan Thinktank found that 64.8 percent of the respondents agreed that the current high threshold — which requires the participation of 50 percent of eligible voters and with at least half of them casting a “yes” vote for the referendum to pass — should be eliminated, with only 22.4 percent not agreeing and 12.8 percent declining to answer, the think tank’s deputy executive director, Lai I-chung (賴怡忠), told a news conference.
Most of those polled, or 54.6 percent, also supported changing the referendum question from: “Do you support suspending construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant?” to: “Do you support or oppose the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant?”
The first question requires voters to answer “yes” or “no,” while the latter allows them to select “support” or “oppose,” Lai said.
Judging by these results, Lai said, the mainstream public opinion on amending the Referendum Act is clear.
As far as the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) is concerned, 72.1 percent of those polled supported determining the resumption of construction with a referendum, while 65.6 percent said that they would support halting the construction and operation of the plant if a referendum were to be held tomorrow.
As New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) and former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) both support lowering the referendum threshold, Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a professor at Soochow University, said that the “post-Ma Ying-jeou era” scenario is clear.
“The future scenario is that the current Referendum Act, also known as the ‘birdcage referendum act,’ will be amended,” Hsu said, adding that Beijing and Washington should pay attention to the potential change.
Another question found that 59.9 percent of respondents did not support the government’s plan to force mandatory medical treatment upon former DPP chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄), who staged a hunger strike against the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and has been hospitalized for a health check, with 23.3 percent supporting the government’s plan.
Opposition to the plan among self-proclaimed pan-green camp supporters and independent voters who participated in the poll exceeded 60 percent in both cases. A surprising result was that more pan-blue camp backers opposed the plan than supported it, 46.8 percent to 41.4 percent.
Pan-blue supporters’ responses to a question in another segment of the poll was also unusual, as 61.2 percent agreed that a supervision statute on cross-strait negotiations should be handled on a “country-to-country” basis, rather than “area-to-area.”
Yiong Cong-ziin (楊長鎮), director of the Tsai Ing-wen Foundation’s department of social development, said the results showed that at least some pan-blue backers began paying serious attention to the issue of national security.
“It seemed that they showed concern about the safety of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and the national security factor in cross-strait negotiations. And they were more willing than before to deliberate the issues beyond political-party affiliation,” Yiong said.
The poll, conducted between Saturday and Monday, collected 1,024 valid samples and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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