Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said that exchanging votes in the election of KMT Central Committee members is allowable, as long as bribery is not involved.
Wu made the remark before casting his votes in yesterday’s internal party election for 210 Central Committee members among 358 nominated party representatives.
As each of the 2,046 representatives gets to cast 105 votes, it is only natural that some candidates who are friends had formed alliances to vote for each other, Wu said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
For instance, if two groups of 30 and 40 representatives formed an alliance to vote for each other, it would take up 70 of the votes each members is allowed to cast, leaving them with 35 votes for candidates outside the alliance, Wu said.
He drew a parallel between the election and the election of corporate board members, who must hold enough shares to run for a seat.
In response to media queries for comment on reports that the election had been “corrupted,” Wu said he would not call it corrupted, adding that he had not received reports of bribery ahead of the election.
“I ordered that money must not be involved. It it were, it would have tainted the election and that would definitely not have been allowed,” he said.
Central Committee members are eligible to run for the party’s Central Standing Committee as well as attend the annual Central Committee conference.
Some KMT members have advocated for the post to be annulled due to its poor functionality and bribery scandals surrounding “vote exchanging alliances.”
In related news, Wu on Friday said that people calling for the reduction in the number of ancient Chinese passages in Chinese literature textbooks are “completely wrong” and urged the Democratic Progressive Party administration to not make a blunder by giving in to them.
More than 100 authors have issued a joint statement through the Association for Taiwan Literature calling for the number of classical Chinese literature pieces in school curricula to be significantly reduced to give importance to Taiwanese literature.
The government should not tamper with high-school geography and history curricula, he said, adding that such actions would deny the Republic of China’s existence.
He was referring to the Ministry of Education’s curriculum guidelines review committee’s ongoing effort to reduce the weighting assigned to Chinese geography and history after the guidelines sparked massive students-led protests in 2015 over their perceived “China-centric” perspective.
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