The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday rejected a media report saying it conducted a poll that showed no minor political party other than the People First Party (PFP) has a chance of winning at-large representation.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday reported that according to an unpublished poll conducted by the DPP, all of the “third force” parties, with the exception of the PFP, would fail to garner the 5 percent of votes required to be allocated at-large legislative seats in next year’s elections.
The Green Party Taiwan had 3 percent support, the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the New Power Party (NPP) both had 2 to 3 percent support; the Free Taiwan Party and Taiwan Independence Action Party had 1 to 2 percent support; and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) had less than 1 percent support, the Apple Daily reported.
The results show that only the DPP, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the PFP have a chance of winning at-large seats in January’s elections, the report said.
However, the DPP denied there was such a survey.
“Let me make it clear: I hereby confirm that such a poll does not exist at all and that the numbers published [by the newspaper] are neither professional nor reliable,” DPP Department of News and Information director Alex Huang (黃重諺) said.
The Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) stipulates that a political party must nominate at least 10 legislative candidates for district representation to join the race for at-large seats and it must garner more than 5 percent of party votes to win at-large legislative seats.
The act says voters are to be given two ballots for the legislative elections, one for district representation and another for party at-large representation.
Although the DPP rejected the report, the numbers are not far from another poll conducted by TVBS.
In the TVBS survey, 29 percent of respondents said they would vote for the DPP, 24 percent backed the KMT, 4 percent favored the PFP and 1 percent were for the Green Party, while the NPP and SDP both had less than 1 percent support.
The TVBS survey also showed that 34 percent of respondents were undecided on which party to vote for.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS