The Central Election Commission is mulling criminal complaints against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which it suspects of forging signatures on a referendum petition to reduce air pollution, a commission official said yesterday.
The commission has determined that there is cause to suspect electoral fraud and officials would convene on Tuesday to decide the proposal’s fate, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The KMT submitted 497,302 signatures for the second phase of the referendum proposal, initiated by KMT Legislator Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕), but the commission had ruled 182,848 signatures, or 36.8 percent, invalid by Thursday last week, the official said.
Photo: CNA
More than 2 percent of signatures belonged to dead people, including some who died long before the petitions were signed, the source said, adding that a significant number of signatures were in the same handwriting styles.
Suspected use of dead people’s identities or and forged signatures were identified on 89,043 petitions, they said, adding that considering the number, the KMT might be liable under the Criminal Code.
The highest number of dead signatories were recorded in Taipei at 2,591, or 4.7 percent, followed by New Taipei City with 1,759 and Taoyuan with 1,058 signatures, or about 2.8 in both municipalities, the source said.
In Kaohsiung, 35,892 signatures out of about 71,000 — or about 50 percent — appeared forged, followed by 16,319 in Taipei and 8,672 in Tainan, or about 20 percent in those municipalities, they said.
There were 18,451 petitions with duplicate signatures, 13,409 petitions containing incorrect or illegible names, 12,205 with incorrect or illegible ID numbers and 34,299 with incorrect or illegible addresses, the official said.
It is unreasonable to assume that 60,000 people were confused about their name, registered address or ID number, and a far more likely explanation is that the errors stemmed from copying or forgery, the official said.
The commission confirmed that it would on Tuesday deliberate on how to proceed with the KMT’s referendum proposals.
It reiterated that it is an independent agency, and would follow the law and due procedure.
This story has been corrected since it was first published.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching