A petition to recall Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has collected enough signatures to pass the threshold for the first step of the recall process, the Central Election Commission (CEC) said on Friday.
A total of 28,560 signatures were verified as valid for the petition, exceeding the required minimum of 22,814, the CEC said.
Under the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), the first step in the three-step recall process is to raise a proposal containing the signatures of 1 percent of the constituency’s eligible voters.
Photo: Chen Wen-chan, Taipei Times
In the case of Kaohsiung, with an estimated 2.28 million eligible voters, this works out to be 22,800 or more signatures.
In the second phase, the initiators of the petition — which was submitted one year after Han’s inauguration on Dec. 25, 2018, as required by law — have 60 days to collect the signatures of 10 percent of the city’s eligible voters, or about 230,000, the CEC said.
Under the act, the previously collected signatures would not be considered valid for this step.
For the recall to pass the third phase, a simple majority must vote in favor of a recall, with at least 25 percent of eligible voters participating, about 570,000 people in the case of Kaohsiung, the CEC said.
Through the Kaohsiung City Government Information Bureau, Han said that he would “respect the decision of the people,” adding that his priority is to spare no effort in managing city affairs.
WeCare Kaohsiung founder Aaron Yin (尹立) urged city officials not to interfere with the Kaohsiung City Election Commission’s processing of the petition.
Kaohsiung Deputy Mayor Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), who is also chairman of the city’s election commission, said that the act has no such requirement, but promised that the petition would be handled fairly and justly.
As Han declared his candidacy in the presidential race just three months after beginning his term as mayor, WeCare has accused Han of abandoning Kaohsiung.
Han has said that he was urged to run by KMT officials.
He began taking time off to campaign for the presidency in October last year, two months short of serving one full year as mayor.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching