Internal party competition boiled to the surface yesterday when a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) city council candidate accused another KMT candidate of trying to steal her votes during the final day of campaigning.
Ying Hsiao-wei (應曉薇) of the Zhongzheng/Wanhua (中正/萬華) electoral district accused Chung Hsiao-ping (鍾小平) of spreading misleading electoral pamphlets, to siphon away her voters.
Electoral pamphlets in pictures provided to reporters urged the relatives of Xin-he Borough (新和) KMT branch members to vote for Chung. The seal of the Taipei KMT branch featured prominently on the pamphlets.
“I’ve only been allocated seven neighborhoods, while Chung has 19 because of concerns over the influence of a corruption case,” Ying said. “He shouldn’t play dirty by forging material urging people [in my neighborhoods] to support him.”
She said all KMT party members and their families in Xin-he are obligated to support her under the party’s system for distributing votes within the district.
Chung said that the pamphlets accurately reflected the party’s complicated system for distributing ballots, adding that he was allocated most of Xin-he, while Ying was allocated the votes of the KMT branch members in question, but not those of their family members.
Under Taipei’s electoral system for city councilors, multiple candidates are elected from a single ballot in each of the city’s six electoral districts. Parties seek to maximize their seats by distributing votes as evenly as possible among their candidates.
While the KMT focuses on allocating boroughs, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is to divide votes in four districts by urging voters to pick DPP candidates based on their birth date or the last digits of their ID number.
The DPP has not implemented an allocation plan in the combined Beitou/Shilin (北投/士林) and Neihu/Nangang (內湖/南港) electoral districts, reportedly due to fierce competition among party candidates.
Despite party attempts to impose discipline, the electoral system pits candidates from the same party against each other in the scramble for votes, creating incentives to ignore party rules or accuse other candidates of doing so.
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