The Appendectomy Project yesterday said it plans to hold 88 seminars across the nation — starting on Thursday — to promote public awareness of citizens’ rights to recall elected officials.
Invitations are to be sent to legislative candidates across party lines asking for their signatures to support an amendment to the law that would see the threshold for an official to be recalled lowered, it said.
The group said that Article 17 of the Constitution — which states that the public has the rights of election, recall, and initiating referendums — supported their proposal, but added that exercising the right of recall is more difficult than is commonly believed.
The efforts of the project and the Constitution 133 Alliance to recall Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) and Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) stalled after the petition failed to reach the threshold to pass the second stage, the group pointed out.
The vote to recall Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) proceeded to the third stage, but then failed due to a low voter turnout of 24.98 percent, the group said.
Regulations on recalls require that 2 percent of an official’s constituency sign a petition for a recall at the first stage and 13 percent at the second stage. The final vote requires at least half of the electorate in a constituency cast their ballots, and at least half of those polled agree to the official’s recall.
The Appendectomy Project, along with Taiwan March and the People Rule Foundation, held a rally on Oct. 3 calling for inept legislators to be swept from office and pledging to renew their efforts to amend the law.
“We plan to ask legislators and legislative candidates to support amendments dropping the required threshold in the first stage from 2 percent to 1 percent and from 13 percent in the second stage to 10 percent,” group member Lin Tsu-yi (林祖儀) said. “We also intend for the third stage voting to be changed to a simple majority vote.”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of the Interior’s planned amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) — which might include an abolition of the rule that “recall votes cannot be spread via propaganda” — have become gridlocked.
The current regulations — that became a focus during Tsai’s recall vote in February — are outdated and should be changed, according to the majority of experts the ministry approached on the issue.
However, what the voter threshold to initiate a recall vote should be has elicited a variety of responses from analysts, with some saying it should be pegged to one third of the total legal voters of a constituency, while others say that half is correct, Civil Affairs Department Deputy Director Luo Rui-ching (羅瑞卿) said.
“We intend to bring to the Legislative Yuan a more complete version of our proposed changes,” she said.
However, Lin criticized the ministry for for what she said was a disappointing attempt to intentionally delay the amendments.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching