The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Youth League, echoing the KMT’s legislative caucus, called on the legislature to include both absentee voting and the lowering of the voting age in the agenda for constitutional amendments, while a group of students condemned KMT caucus whip Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) over his use of an examination schedule protest, accusing him of “political scheming.”
The KMT Youth League, accompanied by KMT legislators, held a news conference yesterday urging the ruling and opposition parties to support not only a lower voting age, but also absentee voting, “which would lower the cost of voting for young people studying or working outside their home districts,” league head Lin Chia-hsing (林家興) said.
One student from Kinmen studying in Taipei said a plane ticket would cost him more than NT$1,000, if he were able to procure one at all.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
“It takes me four to five hours to get home,” he added, in support of removing the need to return home to vote.
The KMT caucus has urged both absentee voting and the lowering of the voting age and to be included in the first round of constitutional amendments, and placed the two in the same article in its proposed draft.
The Democratic Progressive Party and several civil and student groups have criticized the move as deliberately tying two unrelated issues together to raise the stakes, calling it an attempt to “hijack” the legislation.
At a Constitutional Amendment Committee meeting on Wednesday, Lai reiterated the KMT proposal and cited a sit-in by National Chung Cheng University students on Monday against the university scheduling the final day of examinations for the day before the presidential and legislative elections in January next year.
In response, the student club that organized the sit-in issued a statement on Thursday condemning Lai’s move as “taking advantage of students.”
The group said that the problem was caused by the Central Election Committee (CEC) deciding on an election date without first discussing it with universities, which was protested by students from 21 universities in a joint statement immediately after the CEC in March announced the election date.
“If Lai, a lawmaker who supervises administrative agencies, really cared about students’ rights, he would have made his move weeks ago,” the statement said.
“We doubt Lai has done anything to ensure that the Ministry of Education has assisted schools to carry out needed measures to protect students’ suffrage, or exerted any of his supervisory power when the ministry at the end of March revealed that as many as 61 universities had not yet decided on the schedule for their final examinations,” the group’s statement said.
“We cannot help but suspect that Lai has never cared about students’ right to vote, and that his real motive is to rationalize his party’s frustrating of the constitutional amendment bill by tying it to an issue that could be dealt with legally,” the statement said. “We disapprove of this kind of approach.”
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