Prosecutors yesterday indicted Chiayi County Commissioner Chen Ming-wen (陳明文), his wife and six others for vote-buying in the run-up to city and county chief elections on Dec. 1 last year.
Chen is the first county chief elected in December to be indicted for vote-buying.
Chen has denied committing the offense.
Prosecutors at the Chiayi District Prosecutors' Office said Chen and his accomplices organized group tours for local residents and provided free meals, in violation of the Election and Recall Law (選罷法).
Chen won a legislative seat as a KMT candidate in 1998 but quit the party last year and joined the DPP about two months prior to the December polls. He was subsequently nominated by the ruling party as its candidate for county commissioner.
Chen defeated the KMT's Weng Chung-chun (翁重鈞) by less than 8,000 votes in the race.
The indictment said Chen's office contacted "vote captains" across the county in the name of his campaign support group, "Friends of Ah-wen" (阿文之友會), to organize leisure tours for voters between March and August last year.
Others indicted include three staff members of Chen's constituency services office, a township chief and the chief executive of a local farmers' association.
Chen told reporters that the trips took place before he announced his candidacy and had nothing to do with the elections.
But the prosecutors said Chen had long made it clear he planned to run for the commissioner's seat in December and that they had hard evidence -- including propaganda leaflets distributed during the tours and testimonies from several dozen residents -- to prove that the trips were organized for the purpose of swaying voters.
According to the Law on Local Government Systems (地方制度法), Chen will not lose his commissioner's seat unless he is convicted and has lost all appeals.
The DPP government launched a sweeping crackdown on vote-buying before the elections. The Ministry of Justice handled nearly 3,000 reports of alleged vote-buying in the election run-up, which some analysts have called the cleanest in Taiwan's history.
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