Leaders of the campaign to recall Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) yesterday said that they would launch the second stage of the recall process on Wednesday next week, aiming to gather 300,000 signatures in 30 days.
The Central Election Commission on Friday last week announced that a petition to recall Han had collected enough signatures to pass the threshold for the first step of the recall process.
The commission said that 28,560 signatures were verified as valid, higher than the required threshold of 22,814.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang, Taipei Times
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.
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 have 60 days to collect the signatures of 10 percent of the city’s eligible voters, or about 230,000 people, the commission said.
Dubbed the “four gentlemen of the recall Han campaign,” the campaign leaders are WeCare Kaohsiung founder Aaron Yin (尹立), a former Kaohsiung Cultural Affairs Bureau director-general; a spokesman for Citizens Mowing Action who uses the pseudonym Dr Leo; Chang Po-yang (張博洋), a representative of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party, and Chen Kuan-jung (陳冠榮), the initiator of the campaign.
Yesterday they visited the city’s Yicheng Temple (意誠堂) to pray and make an offering to the gods, to say thank you for the successful recall rally on Dec. 21, and to ask for a blessing to reach the threshold for the next stage.
In related news, the Kaohsiung City Government yesterday accused writer Ku Ling (苦苓) of slander.
The city government had said that holding a recall vote for Han vote and related activities would cost NT$200 million (US$6.68 million), which would place a financial strain on it.
Ku wrote that if citizens succeeded in voting Han out of office, the city government could save NT$120 billion.
“Since Han took up the position of mayor, he has saddled the city with NT$40 billion in debt,” Ku said. “Based on this rate, if Han finishes his four-year term, the debt could reach NT$120 billion.”
The city government said: “We demand that Ku Ling clarify his statement immediately and make a public apology, or we will file a lawsuit against him.”
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