The Central Election Commission (CEC) on Thursday last week announced that 19 legislator recall campaigns can enter the second stage, while nine cases did not meet the threshold and require supplementation before they can be approved. The approved petitions were all against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators, and the failed ones were all against Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators.
The lawmakers facing the second stage of the recall process include KMT caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (?), KMT caucus deputy secretary-general Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇), and legislators Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) and Ma Wen-chun (馬文君).
The recall vote approvals imply that there is significant discontent among the public toward actions taken by KMT and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators, such as attempting to enhance the legislature’s power at the expense of the executive branch, arbitrarily cutting and freezing important government budgets, including for national defense, and submitting and taking China-friendly bills and actions.
The recall reviews also revealed a serious issue that should not be overlooked — high rates of signatures of people who are deceased in the nine recall cases against DPP legislators, as well as several allegedly impersonated petitioners.
While signatures of deceased people in the recall cases against KMT lawmakers ranged from zero to three, with petition qualification rates ranging from 87.73 percent to 96.9 percent, signatures of people who are deceased in the nine cases against DPP lawmakers ranged from 39 to 189, with the qualification rates ranging from 60.18 percent to 82.22 percent.
Out of 1,882 signatures to recall DPP Legislator Saidhai Tahovecahe, 189 were from deceased people. Of the 2,710 signatures to recall DPP Legislator Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城), 1,079 were disqualified (about 40 percent), including 139 deceased people.
Asked about the high rate of deceased people’s signatures, the group advocating for Lee Kuen-cheng to be recalled displayed a casual disregard for the law, saying: “It is possibly because the DPP administration has made the gods angry and the people resentful, so the deceased rose from the dead to sign the petitions.”
Elsewhere, a 77-year-old man surnamed Hsu (徐) filed a lawsuit against the group seeking to recall DPP Legislator Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) because his and his wife’s names were listed as two of the leading proponents of the campaign, despite them never even seeing the petition papers.
Several other people, including a few who identified as former KMT members or employees, also filed lawsuits against groups recalling DPP lawmakers for allegedly fraudulently using personal information.
The weak performance and general lack of enthusiasm for the recall petitions against DPP lawmakers have raised speculations that many signatures could have been fraudulent, such as being copied from the KMT members’ lists, which would be illegal.
Moreover, the lackluster performance of the KMT petitions against the DPP also indicates that they were purely retaliatory, rather than stemming from organic, bottom-up opposition to the DPP lawmakers.
However, the campaign to recall DPP lawmakers is not over. If the proponents of the nine failed cases submit enough valid supplementary signatures within 10 days of the CEC’s review, their recall petitions can still advance to the second phase.
Proponents of recalling KMT legislators should not rejoice for too long, as the real challenge has just begun. For their campaigns to be successful, they would need to avoid getting entangled in KMT smear campaigns to distract the public and should ramp up their campaigns by communicating to neutral voters why they should support them.
The task for the second stage is to collect signatures from at least 10 percent of total voters in their electoral district within the next 60 days.
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