Two Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators have proposed bills to legislate the dates of civil servant elections and by-elections to shorten the transition of power period.
DPP Legislator Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) has proposed a draft amendment to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) that stipulates that the date for civil servant elections be set for the first Saturday of December in an election year, while that for by-elections be set for the seventh Saturday after a by-election is called.
The proposal comes in the wake of the four-month interregnum between the presidential election and the inauguration of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
If the Legislative Yuan is disbanded, then the date of holding a legislative election should be set on the Saturday of the seventh week after the disbandment, the proposal says.
The following legislative elections should be held on the seventh Saturday before the legislature’s inauguration day, it says.
DPP Legislator Chang Hung-lu (張宏陸) also proposed a draft amendment to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法), which stipulates that such an election should be held on the last Saturday of March in the year when a presidential term ends.
The two bills have been proposed to address the unpredictability caused by the four-month period between the Jan. 16 presidential election and the inauguration of the new government on May 20, and the two-week period between the Jan. 16 legislative elections and the inauguration of the new legislature.
After changing the election dates, the transition period would not be too long or too short, and it would prevent a repetition of the inconvenience this year in which the elections were held during college students’ final examinations, Su said.
While presidential and legislative elections have been held simultaneously in 2012 and this year, presidential and legislative terms are out of sync by more than three months.
The two bills do not attempt to deal with the issue of synchronizing the legislative and presidential inauguration dates.
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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