The first indictment this year for vote buying in connection with farmers' associations elections was made yesterday.
Hualien (
Tomorrow, hundreds of township-level farmers' associations across the country will have their member representatives and basic-level cadre members elected by association members.
Early this month investigators and the police seized gifts given to two Chian (吉安) Township farmers' association members by association representative candidate Chiou Tai-shan (邱泰山), with Chiou's campaign leaflets attached to the gifts, the prosecution said.
The prosecution believes that the gifts were a bribe in exchange for the votes. Chiou has admitted that he gave the gifts, but denied they were bribes for votes.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice said yesterday that prosecutors nationwide have so far received reports of as many as 130 vote-buying cases.
In the run-up to the farmers' association elections, the ministry yesterday held a meeting attended by prosecutor generals of all the prosecutors' offices and heads of the ministry's Investigation Bureau's units nationwide to coordinate anti-vote buying efforts.
The farmers' association elections are always hard fought battles between local factions, primarily because the associations own credit cooperatives, for whose control the factions compete.
After their election, association representatives elect board members, who in turn elect a board chairman. The board can appoint its secretary general.
But in practice the process is very much "reversed." Those who intend to control the board seek to ensure first that their people will be elected as representatives.
Vote buying is one of the major means of achieving this purpose, and the stakes become higher during the later processes of electing board members and chairmen.
Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (
The Black Gold Investigation Center (
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