He was elected twice, with more than 16,000 votes each time, but on Jan. 16, 84,582 people voted to oust him in a recall vote. Could former Taoyuan city councilor Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇), who left office on Friday last week, really have behaved badly enough for more than 80,000 people to vote for his ouster?
Some people say this happened because of loud voices on the Internet. Others put it down to mobilization by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
No matter why it happened, the simplest factor involved is a mathematical one. In a multimember electoral district where 90 percent of voters support the KMT or other pan-blue parties, Wang was re-elected in 2018 with just 8.68 percent of the vote.
However, when it came to this month’s recall vote, the pan-blue voters concentrated all their voting power on one target. Given that pan-blue candidates had garnered nearly 90 percent of the total votes in the election, it is hardly surprising that 96 percent of the votes in the recall vote were in favor of recalling Wang.
What this shows is that, in any traditionally pan-blue electoral district, blue-camp voters can easily recall a non-KMT official just by concentrating all of their votes on that individual.
This objective numerical reasoning is enough to explain why they can.
In theory, the same thing could happen in electoral districts with an iron-clad pan-green majority, but there is no proof of this theory because it has not happened so far.
The Taoyuan recall is not comparable to the recall of then-Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), who is a member of the pan-blue KMT, in June last year, because Kaohsiung is not a region in which an unusually high proportion of people vote for pan-green parties.
This sequence of events highlights a risk that badly needs attention.
The problem is that, although the law regarding recalls was last amended in 2016, it immediately led to a recall vote in which then-New Power Party legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) was nearly ousted.
It also led to Han becoming the first-ever municipal mayor to be successfully recalled.
Evidently, the rules laid out in the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) need to be re-examined and adjusted to achieve a balance between it being either very easy or impossible for recall bids to succeed.
If that does not happen, any political camp that can mobilize a long-term transient population of 500,000 voters would be able to recall elected officials from the opposing camp wherever it wants to.
If that comes to be, Taiwan’s democracy would be extremely imperfect and unstable.
Joshua Tin is an economist.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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