The legislature’s Constitution Amendment Committee yesterday resolved to take several high-profile bills, including proposals to lower the legal voting age and the threshold for parties to secure legislator-at-large seats, as well as those on reinstating the legislature’s right to vote on a premier and introduce absentee voting, to a plenary session for discussion.
Legislators agreed that the proposals, previously bound together in a package by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), would be discussed individually at the plenary session.
With yesterday being the deadline for reviewing the bills, the decision was made after legislators from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the KMT failed to reach a consensus on the majority of issues discussed during the current legislative session.
KMT Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) said the KMT supports implementing absentee voting so that people working far from home would not have to travel to vote.
Referring to a bill on lowering the legal voting age, from 20 to 18, Wang said that the two bills should be passed in tandem, as both aim to boost civic participation.
On restoring the legislature’s right to approve the president’s appointment of a premier, she said that the mechanism would grant the premier freedom in executing administrative power rather than submitting to the president’s will, thus enhancing a system of checks and balances.
DPP legislators objected to reviewing the bills as a package, with Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) saying that approved bills should be put to a plebiscite, but if the bills were passed as a package, the topic for the referendum would be confusing and skewed, thus undermining the public’s right to vote.
Yu said “boosting civic participation” is a very vague term, with the interpretation differing from one person to another.
She said that a proposal to lower the threshold of the ratio of party votes a party must receive to gain a legislator-at-large seat from 5 percent of the overall total of party votes cast nationwide to 3 percent is also a means to increase public engagement in elections.
DPP Legislator Cheng Lee-chun (鄭麗君) said that if the bill on lowering the legal voting age were not forwarded to the plenary session for review, Taiwan would become the most backward country in Asia, after Japan passes a bill to lower its voting age from 20 to 18, which is expected to happen next year.
While lawmakers agreed on this issue, Cheng’s proposal to change the portion in the Constitution’s text about the legal voting age met with an objection from KMT Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元).
The committee later resolved that the rule would be introduced as a clause.
Following a reading of 34 bills discussed during the legislative session, Cheng announced that all the bills would be discussed individually at the plenary session.
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