The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday rejected a media report saying it conducted a poll that showed no minor political party other than the People First Party (PFP) has a chance of winning at-large representation.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday reported that according to an unpublished poll conducted by the DPP, all of the “third force” parties, with the exception of the PFP, would fail to garner the 5 percent of votes required to be allocated at-large legislative seats in next year’s elections.
The Green Party Taiwan had 3 percent support, the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the New Power Party (NPP) both had 2 to 3 percent support; the Free Taiwan Party and Taiwan Independence Action Party had 1 to 2 percent support; and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) had less than 1 percent support, the Apple Daily reported.
The results show that only the DPP, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the PFP have a chance of winning at-large seats in January’s elections, the report said.
However, the DPP denied there was such a survey.
“Let me make it clear: I hereby confirm that such a poll does not exist at all and that the numbers published [by the newspaper] are neither professional nor reliable,” DPP Department of News and Information director Alex Huang (黃重諺) said.
The Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) stipulates that a political party must nominate at least 10 legislative candidates for district representation to join the race for at-large seats and it must garner more than 5 percent of party votes to win at-large legislative seats.
The act says voters are to be given two ballots for the legislative elections, one for district representation and another for party at-large representation.
Although the DPP rejected the report, the numbers are not far from another poll conducted by TVBS.
In the TVBS survey, 29 percent of respondents said they would vote for the DPP, 24 percent backed the KMT, 4 percent favored the PFP and 1 percent were for the Green Party, while the NPP and SDP both had less than 1 percent support.
The TVBS survey also showed that 34 percent of respondents were undecided on which party to vote for.
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