THE ENDLESS DEBATE regarding one-step or two-step voting is not merely a small technicality. The Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) stubbornness in insisting on two-step voting is worth a close look.
Some say the KMT was able to rule Taiwan for 50 years because in addition to the military, police and white terror, they also relied on vote buying and lies.
This is commonly said and also a "truth" passed down by our elders: The KMT wouldn't know how to run an election without vote buying. In the 50 years of its rule, the KMT built an extremely detailed network for township, village and borough chiefs, as well as agricultural and fishing association and trade union officials who were all important vote captains during elections.
According to the book A Confession of Bribery, written by a former KMT official, the function of a vote captain is to follow community registers and spend money at strategic moments to lock in votes, making it easy to estimate the number of votes prior to the election. The mystery of two-step voting, where ballots are received separately, is that it makes it simple to count the number of people who do not participate in the referendum, to report the performance back to those above, and to grasp whether the referendum will be passed.
The Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) push for reclaiming stolen party assets hits the nail on the head. The party assets are its life-blood, hence the draft statute governing stolen party assets has repeatedly failed to pass through the legislature. After East and West Germany united, Germany immediately passed legislation liquidating the party assets of the East German Communist Party -- good example of transitional justice.
In a self-proclaimed democracy like Taiwan, how can a party with assets worth billions and a party heavily in debt compete on equal footing? Can this be considered democracy?
The point of the referendum on reclaiming party assets is to force the legislature to pass the statute governing stolen party assets so that the assets can be returned to the nation by means of the will of the nation.
Due to the two-step voting procedure during the first referendum in 2004, many people were deprived of their referendum rights -- most Taiwanese failed to receive referendum ballots. Using two-step voting is a diversionary tactic used to lower the rate of voter participation and thus lower the possibility the referendum will be passed.
The "red-shirt army" is an anti-President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) movement, not a democratic movement. One-step voting is a 100 percent democratic movement. The first step to democratic progress is to allow the public to directly express their opinion on civic issues so that contentious matters are resolved through referendums. That is a democratic movement.
Hence we must appeal to the Taiwanese public to demand their city and county councilors fight pan-blue city and county councils on this issue and demand that mayors, county commissioners and county election councils restore their civic rights. If you are an incumbent legislator or a legislative candidate, please stand up for one-step voting.
Taiwan is currently in the midst of a democratic civil war. We have the power to resist despotism and move confidently toward one-step voting so that democracy can progress. Taiwan can only become a truly democratic nation if the public can directly express its opinions through referendums and use them to demonstrate the nation's collective will. This wave of democracy has come just in time.
Michelle Wang is the deputy secretary-general of the Northern Taiwan Society.
Translated by Angela Hong
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS