In the nine-in-one elections last year, civic groups protested the Central Election Commission’s (CEC) decision to ban members of the public from taking photographs and making video recordings in the audience area at ballot-box tallying stations during vote counting.
On Wednesday, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan, asked CEC Chairman Liu Yi-chou (劉義周) whether the commission planned to reconsider the ban.
Liu said the commission planned to meet this month to discuss a resolution passed by the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee, which requests that the CEC revoke the ban, and added that he would lobby in favor of the resolution.
The commission’s reluctance to take action is not surprising. Although civic groups have repeatedly urged the agency to reform a variety of election-related regulations before every election, the issues have remained unresolved.
Examples of such matters include the calls to lower the voting age from 20 to 18 and the discussions over whether to implement absentee voting.
Such issues end up being treated by political parties as bargaining chips for constitutional amendments; and as a result, nothing gets done to genuinely address them.
The ballot-counting process must be open and transparent. This is the guiding principle that election agencies in all nations must follow.
For example, in Mongolia, to address the strong suspicions over the transparency of the ballot-counting process, the government in 2012 began broadcasting the entire process to people waiting outside voting stations. The number of disputes caused by the process has been greatly reduced ever since.
The commission fears that allowing people to videotape the ballot-counting process inside voting stations might violate electoral neutrality.
It has also come up with several other excuses, such as allowing members of the public to take photographs and record videos would put too much pressure on election officials, or the practice being prohibitively expensive.
It is understood that given the ubiquity of digital technology — most people have cameras on their mobile phones — it is virtually impossible to stop people from taking pictures or making video recordings of the ballot-counting process.
This shows that Chen was right when he said at the Legislative Yuan that, “the [CEC] should not remain in the Stone Age, it must make politics more open and more transparent.”
Chen Chien-fu is convener of Citizen’s Congress Watch’s interactive video-on-demand team.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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