An election watchdog group yesterday urged the government to enforce stricter protocols for vote-counting, saying that what they described as widespread negligence observed during the nine-in-one elections could increase the risk of fraud.
According to a survey conducted by the Observers Alliance at 343 polling stations nationwide on Nov. 29, staff at 24 percent of the polling stations organized the ballots into separate piles for different candidates before proceeding to count them.
Group convener Huang Sheng-feng (黃聖峰) said the Central Election Commission should provide more training for polling station workers. He also said the public needed to be educated on the importance of the issue.
“Staff at many polling stations simply counted the number of votes for each bundle, instead of announcing the ballots from the ballot box one-by-one.” Huang said.
“Bundling up votes before counting them can lead to ballots being stealthily added or taken away from the piles,” Huang said.
“At a lot of the polling stations — even with observers from both political parties present — poll workers failed to adhere to correct vote-counting procedures, to speed things up,” he said, adding that the votes were counted so swiftly that monitoring the process was extremely difficult.
Polling station workers often dismissed concerns from the group’s volunteers, Huang said.
“They just claimed that things have always been done this way,” he added.
The group also reiterated its dissatisfaction over a decision the commission made in September to prohibit filming at polling stations and questioned whether the government was afraid of public scrutiny.
Citizen Congress Watch executive director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) expressed his belief in the need for vote-counting reforms, saying that the nation was “outdated” in the way it treated election observers from overseas, as the government showed them only the commission headquarters instead of local polling stations.
In response, the commission acknowledged that a “small portion” of polling stations failed to adhere to correct vote-counting procedures, adding that the standard protocols for future elections should be improved.
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