The Central Election Commission (CEC) will allow signature forms for presidential campaign petition drives to be submitted electronically, commission Chairman Liu Yi-chou (劉義周) said yesterday, in response to demands from independent presidential candidate Shih Ming-te (施明德).
“The paper affidavit form and national ID card copies can be submitted electronically [to the candidate] and will be valid after the candidate adds his stamp or signature,” Liu said after a meeting with Shih.
He rejected Shih’s demand to allow use of Citizen Digital Certificates in lieu of paper forms and copies.
The certificates are smart cards which government bureaus use to verify citizens’ identities online. After inserting the cards into computer-connected card readers, users can enter a personal identification number (PIN) to complete tasks such as reporting income and looking up personal information registered with government bureaus.
Shih had campaigned for use of the certificates to make it easier to reach the signature threshold, saying that they were already considered legally binding electronic signatures under the Electronic Signatures Act (電子簽章法).
Presidential candidates have to collect signatures equal to 1.5 percent of the votes of the most recent legislative elections to be placed on the ballot, or about 269,000 signatures this cycle.
“Even though I’m not entirely satisfied, I still have to say that the commission has made some progress, even if it cannot remove the legal obstacles” to opening up use of Citizen Digital Certificates,” Shih said, calling on the legislature to revise electoral laws to allow for the use of digital signatures.
He said that the signature requirement was a way for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party to “monopolize” the presidential race, adding that both the threshold and verification requirements greatly exceed those of Hong Kong and the US.
The commission said the signature collection would begin on Sept. 22 after the official forms are announced and continue until Nov. 6.
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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