Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Lawmaker Yang Li-huan (楊麗環) yesterday requested a recount after losing her seat to her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opponent by a margin of 169 votes in Saturday’s legislative election.
Yang was defeated by the DPP’s Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) in Taoyuan’s hotly contested fourth electoral district, with Cheng claiming 86,389 votes.
Under the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), the loser can to apply for a recount if the vote margin is equal to or less than 0.3 percent.
Yang’s staff on Saturday said that the four-term legislator beat Cheng by about 30 votes.
The law stipulates that after Yang’s appeal, the results of the recount should be announced within 20 days.
The Central Election Commission said that the DPP secured 68 of the 113 seats in the Legislative Yuan in the election, compared with the KMT’s 35 seats.
In other news, the DPP’s Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) garnered the highest number of votes in the nation in the legislative elections.
Wang received 153,553 votes, or 72.04 percent of the total, in Tainan’s fifth electoral district, while his closest rival, the KMT’s Lin Yi-huang (林易煌) received 51,742 votes, or 24.27 percent of the total.
Wang, 46, a third-time city councilor, has been seeking a seat in the legislature since 2008.
“Winning a seat is not a victory, but the most serious duty and a public mandate,” he said.
In October 2008, Wang mobilized his supporters to protest against then-Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strats vice chairman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) when he was paying a visit to Tainan as a Xiamen University professor.
Amid the ensuing melee, Zhang was knocked to the ground before he was hurried to his car.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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