The Taiwan Citizen Union and several students’ associations from universities nationwide yesterday urged young people to vote in the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections, and said they were launching a crowdfunding campaign to help fund bus tickets for those wanting to return home to cast their ballots.
“There is actually an economic threshold to voting, as many students are unable to afford to go home to cast their ballot,” said Fan Yun (范雲), a National Taiwan University sociology professor and president of the Taiwan Citizen Union.
“It is important to tackle the disparity between the rich and the poor in terms of their ability to vote,” she said.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
Hsu Wei-ting (許韋婷), a youth organizer with the union, said a train trip from Taipei to Greater Kaohsiung costs NT$843, while a student with a minimum-wage job makes just NT$920 a day.
The group plans to launch a fundraising campaign on Internet crowdfunding platform FlyingV, to raise NT$150,000 to fund a total of 22 bus routes on election day.
National Taiwan University Student Association president Sandy Wang (王日暄) backed the plan, saying that students should take responsibility in initiating social change.
The association had already launched a similar campaign to arrange bus trips from the school to locations across the country on voting day, providing discounted tickets to students, Wang said.
The union also encouraged students to carpool and share expenses for their trip by using Brazilian Internet platform Tripda.
Tripda Taiwan chief executive Crane Wang (王鶴穆) said the company supports youth engagement in social change regardless of political affiliation, adding that the firm intends to devote an online campaign to encourage its users to carpool on voting day and to vote.
The organizers also called on the government to formulate plans for absentee voting to ensure young people pursuing their studies far from home have an opportunity to vote. By law, people can only vote where their households are registered.
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
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