The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday paid a NT$100,000 (US$2,815) reward to a Chiayi county resident who tipped off the party on vote-buying in the county and provided evidence against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative candidate Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) and New Party candidate Pan Huai-tsung (潘懷宗) of vote-buying.
“The first cash reward is given to a Chiayi resident who called the DPP central anti-vote-buying hotline to tip off the party about suspected vote-buying activities. We then forwarded the case to the [Chiayi] prosecutors’ office, as well as the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau, and the [Chiayi District] court ruled to detain those involved after a review of the cases,” DPP campaign chief executive Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) told a news conference at the party headquarters yesterday morning. “It is regrettable that political parties are still taking the risk of buying votes.”
“It should also give the judicial agencies a chance to think about why people would trust the DPP and tip us off, instead of trusting the judiciary,” Su said.
In the past few days, several elected officials, their friends and families in Chiayi County — including the KMT Shueishang Township (水上) Council speaker Wu Pei-yu (吳培裕), KMT former Shueishang Township mayor Cheng Lai-chu (鄭來居) and a borough chief surnamed Kuo (郭) in Taibao City (太保) — were detained for alleged vote-buying.
To keep the whistleblower’s identity confidential, the DPP declined to reveal whether the person tipped the DPP off on the Shueishang or the Taibao cases.
The DPP also showed video footage of Chiang giving out a bicycle costing more than NT$2,000 and a fan worth more than NT$1,000 as presents at an event in his constituency, as well as Pan distributing 0.5 liter bottles of laundry detergent at a campaign event concert.
“The Ministry of Justice has clearly and repeatedly stated that candidates may not give out presents valued at more than NT$30 each to voters,” DPP anti-vote-buying task force executive director Lien Li-jen (連立堅) said.
DPP spokesperson Yang Chia-liang (楊家俍) said that in the 2012 elections, the KMT was fined more than NT$45 million for campaign irregularities, and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said that it was a “shameful mark on the KMT.”
“If [KMT chairman] Eric Chu (朱立倫) will not solve the vote-buying issue in the party, the ‘shameful mark’ will remain on the KMT forever,” Yang 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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