The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) yesterday proposed amending the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) to allow independent candidates to recommend polling station supervisors, who oversee the voting process.
The act stipulates that only those political parties which have received a minimum of 5 percent of all votes in the most recent legislative elections can recommend polling supervisors for elections to select mayors and county or city commissioners.
As it stands, the restriction deprives independent Taipei mayoral candidates Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Neil Peng (馮光遠) and Shen Fu-hsiung (沈富雄) of the capacity to send a supervisor to polling stations.
The parties tabled their proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee, saying that regulations had to be changed to allow all candidates, regardless of which political party they are affiliated with or whether they even have an affiliation, to recommend their ballot supervisors.
Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-jen (陳威仁) and Central Election Commission Vice Chairman Liu Yi-chou (劉義周) supported the proposed change, with Chen saying he would be “happy to witness its success,” since democratic elections should be fair and transparent.
However, Liu also stressed that the commission is “fairly unbiased” as is, a comment that DPP Legislator Hsu Tain-tsair (許添財) seized on during the question-and-answer session, saying that it is the agency’s responsibility to continue pursuing impartiality.
Hsu said that this was especially so “since it was just a couple of years ago that the ruling party would engage in ‘black-box’ manipulation of votes.”
Despite not being a committee member, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) showed up for the meeting, where he opposed the proposed revision, calling it an ad hoc amendment specially tailored to benefit Ko in November’s Taipei mayoral race.
“There are more than 15,000 polling stations across the country and if you pay NT$1,500 to have an extra supervisor there, that means NT$20 million [US$667,000] more would have to be allocated to pay for these observers,” Tsai said. “How much milk can you buy for children [with NT$20 million]? Do you consider this amount of money to be trivial?” he asked.
Tsai took the opposition parties to task for proposing the amendment now instead of having done so earlier, saying there had been plenty of independent candidates in previous elections, but no one had complained about any “unfairness” then.
“They are doing it now because the issue has been brought up by Ko. This is Ko’s self-aggrandizing amendment,” Tsai said.
DPP Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) told Tsai to bear in mind that Ko is not the only independent candidate in the year-end elections; Peng, Sheng, former TSU legislator Huang Wen-ling (黃文玲) and Keelung Council Speaker Huang Ching-tai (黃景泰) are also running independently.
Huang Wen-ling is seeking to be elected Changhua commissioner and Huang Ching-tai is seeking to be Keelung mayor after being dropped as the KMT’s candidate.
Despite Tsai’s opposition, the amendments were referred to cross-party negotiations and are expected to be discussed in tomorrow’s floor meeting, said DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), who presided over yesterday’s meeting.
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