Citizens Mowing Action yesterday handed about 150,000 valid signatures to Chen Kuan-jung (陳冠榮), the lead petitioner of a campaign to recall Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), bringing the total number of signatures to more than 510,000.
Reset Kaohsiung Headquarters said that as of Saturday night, it had received about 363,000 signatures from Wecare Kaohsiung, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party and other petition locations before Citizens Mowing Action delivered its signatures.
The group delivered about 180,000 signatures, but 30,000 of them were in incorrect formats, Chen said.
Photo: Ko Yu-hao, Taipei Times
Along with Wecare Kaohsiung and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party’s signatures, the campaign is now “very close” to reaching the 580,000 signature threshold needed to launch a recall vote against Han, he said.
The campaigners will likely submit the signatures by the middle of next month, Wecare Kaohsiung founder Aaron Yin (尹立) said.
The petition has not ended, he said, adding that he hopes people would continue to sign the petition to reach the threshold.
The Kaohsiung City Election Commission on Friday said that it would impose a fine of NT$100,000 to NT$1 million (US$3,289 to US$32,891) on Reset Kaohsiung Headquarters in accordance with the the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法).
Reset Kaohsiung Headquarters has desks and staff at its premises, and should be considered the recall campaign’s offices, but when Chen proposed the recall at the end of last year, he did not say he would set up an office by the Jan. 2 deadline, the commission said.
Supporters of the campaign said the commission was “nitpicking.”
Reset Kaohsiung Headquarters is just a venue that accepts signatures, not Chen’s office, they said.
The commission denied it was “nitpicking,” saying it was acting on a report filed by members of the public.
The Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法) gives those who were reported an opportunity to respond, it said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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