Small parties should band together to send representatives to observe ballot counting at national polling sites, the People’s Ballot Inspection Alliance said yesterday, announcing a new app aimed at making observation easier by taking advantage of new rules allowing photography.
“If you do not go in, no one will help you take pictures,” Taiwan Asian Network for Free Elections president Chen Chien-fu (陳建甫) said. “Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] and Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] observers only care about their own ballots — they do not care about anyone else’s.”
While both the DPP and KMT receive government subsidies to pay for observers at polling stations, voting threshold requirements ensure that most small parties are ineligible, he said, adding that the group hopes sending small-party observers would make the Central Election Commission handle at-large legislative ballots more cautiously.
Compiling an independent tally of results could enable candidates to require a review of ballots in the event of a controversy, he said.
“There is a lot of local interest in district legislators, but because the at-large ballot is national, people do not follow it as closely,” he said. “For the two main parties, an extra seat on the at-large ballot is not that big of a deal, but for a small party it can make a huge difference.”
Polling higher than the 5 percent voting threshold automatically entitles parties to two at-large legislative seats. A third seat enables parties to establish a party caucus and participate in “cross-caucus negotiations,” which often determine the details of important legislation.
The new alliance’s app takes advantage of new rules allowing photography during vote counting, enabling users to send in photographs of official forms recording polling station results, as well as vote tallies and the number of invalid ballots, Chen said, adding that users are encouraged to save pictures of any ballots over which there is controversy.
“While there could be disputes over ballots if you tally figures by hand or telephone in an oral report, taking pictures of official results forestalls conflicts,” he said, adding that the new regulations could be crucial to recruiting a sufficient number of volunteers to observe vote counting.
“Last time we failed because observers had to count every ballot and that was too much pressure,” he said, adding that the group recruited only about 1,000 volunteers to observe vote counts during last year’s local elections.
Under the new rules observers from among the public can go to polling stations close to the time vote counts are finalized to take pictures of official results, rather than listening for hours for every ballot to be announced, he said.
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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