Overseas Taiwanese living in the US have started returning to the country to help monitor the elections for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidates as well as for independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Taiwan United Nations Alliance vice chairman Wei Jui-ming (魏瑞明) said yesterday.
With Ko leading in public opinion polls, many expect him to beat his main rival, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Sean Lien (連勝文), on Nov. 29, Wei said.
This has prompted many overseas Taiwanese to volunteer as election monitors for Ko’s camp, he said, citing his wife as an example of those who hope to assist Ko.
The DPP did not have enough staff to oversee the voting process during the 2012 presidential and legislative elections, and rumors about bribery at the local levels were rife, Wei said.
Concerned that the election’s impartiality might be affected by a shortage of ballot overseers for the green camp, overseas Taiwanese have been coming back to aid the DPP, he said.
The World Taiwanese Congress (WTC) based in the US has initiated a movement calling on overseas Taiwanese to return to the country to monitor the elections, with WTC secretary-general Wang Kang-hou (王康厚) leading a seminar on overseeing the balloting process on Nov. 24.
Overseas Taiwanese are coordinating with the DPP on which cities or counties they would be assigned to to assist the party’s candidates, Wei said, adding that many have asked in particular to help Ko.
All these Taiwanese, who come from all over the US, are financing their own trips back to the country, Wei said.
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:
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