Sat, Oct 30, 2010 page3

• ELECTIONS: MOI defends absentee voting

  COUNTING EVERY VOTE: A recent telephone survey found that 73.5 percent of respondents backed allowing voters to cast their ballots outside their hometowns

  • By Flora Wang / Staff Reporter, with CNA
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  Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) yesterday defended the ministry’s plan to push absentee voting against allegations made by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers that the new voting mechanism is intended to boost the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) performance in the 2012 presidential election.

  The ministry has said it would push for an amendment to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法) to make absentee voting in the presidential election possible.

  Many Taiwanese, especially young people, work away from their registered places of residence — usually their hometowns — but under current voting laws, they must return to their hometowns to vote.

  Under the plan, all eligible voters, except those who live abroad, would be able to cast their vote outside the county or city where their household is registered as long as they file an application within a period designated by the Central Election Commission.

  Jiang argued on the legislative floor yesterday that the new voting system is meant to help those studying or working away from home exercise their civil rights, adding that the mechanism is not meant to serve any particular election or candidate, but to establish a “sustainable democratic system.”

  “No one can predict or swing the decisions of the absentees,” Jiang said. “Although the number of voters may increase with the introduction of the mechanism, which party or individual may benefit from the mechanism is not our concern.”

  Jiang caused controversy after he said in a speech to students at National Taiwan University on Thursday that election results could be overturned overnight if absentee voting were implemented.

  In his speech, Jiang said that in the past, there were presidential elections that ended in a small margin of victory for certain candidates, and that if absentee voting were taken into account, the results would have been different.

  The remark prompted DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) to speculate yesterday that Jiang was implying that the mechanism would benefit the KMT in the presidential election.

  Grilled by Chen on the legislative floor, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said he disagreed that Jiang made a blunder, adding that the government would not push electoral system reform without public support.

  While promising that the ministry would study the possibility of an act governing absentee voting, Wu said that an absentee voting mechanism had the support of a number of people in the government’s surveys.

  Wu was referring to a survey released by the ministry on Thursday which showed 78 percent of the people polled were in favor of adopting an absentee voting system.

  The telephone poll found 78 percent of respondents supported allowing voters to vote by absentee ballot, compared with 21.1 percent who were against the idea.

  Meanwhile, 73.5 percent of respondents backed a form of absentee voting that allows voters to cast their ballots at polling stations outside their hometowns on election day. Another 24.8 percent of those -surveyed did not prefer this alternative, according to the survey.

  Nearly 83 percent of respondents agreed that ROC citizens living overseas should not be able to vote by absentee ballots, compared with 64.9 percent who said absentee voting should be applied to as many people as possible.

  In terms of who should be considered priority voters under such a system, 77 percent of respondents said people who work outside their hometowns, followed by voters who study outside their hometowns, policemen on duty, military personnel and election staff.

  In addition, more than 71 percent of respondents were in favor of putting the system into effect in the presidential election in 2012, while 27.2 percent were against the idea.

  The poll conducted from Oct. 14 to Oct. 16 collected 1,094 valid samples, with a sampling error of plus or minus 2.96 percentage points.

  Additional reporting by Shelley Huang
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