To stamp out vote-buying in Taichung County, six DPP legislative primary candidates yesterday jointly signed an agreement to cancel the party members' vote to be held on April 1.
The vote was to be the second stage of the DPP's legislative primary.
Four of the six will instead be chosen according to the results of telephone polls, which will be announced next Tuesday.
"Every one of us has signed and welcomed the agreement. It shows that I am not the only one who [vote-sellers] have tried to blackmail," initiator of the agreement Liu Kun-li (
He added that no candidates wished the primary election to be manipulated by vote-sellers.
The DPP's Central Standing Committee yesterday approved their agreement, ruling that the party would cancel the party members' vote in Taichung County.
The six Taichung candidates include incumbent legislators Lin Feng-hsi (
Results of recent polls indicate the credentials and local connections of Lin, Chiu and Kuo have led to an expectation that they will perform better than the remaining candidates.
All six of the candidates have agreed not to dispute the outcome of the election even if their poll figures are within the standard margin of error of three percent.
Liu held a press conference last Tuesday at which he lashed out at the party's rampant vote-buying and vote-selling in central Taiwan.
He said that he had been asked to secure votes through vote-buying by being shown a bag of party members' identification cards for sale after Chinese New Year this year.
The cost per vote was estimated to be somewhere between NT$1,000 and NT$3,000, he said.
There are approximately 5,300 party members in Taichung County. Following Liu's allegation, the party's vote-buying investigation team began to look into vote-buying in central Taiwan.
The team's head, Hsu Yang-ming (許陽明) -- who is also the party's deputy secretary-general, returning from his two-day investigation trip late Monday evening said, "There has been some progress made," but refused to give further details.
Hsu, joined by other team members, including the deputy governor of the central bank Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) and Hung Kuei-tsan (洪貴參), also held a closed-door meeting on Monday night to discuss and verify collected evidence.
Party secretary-general Wu Nai-jen (
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