The Central Election Commission (CEC) mishandled the nine-in-one elections on Nov. 24 last year, Control Yuan member Peter Chang (張武修) said yesterday, a day after the government watchdog censured the commission for chaos at many polling stations that day.
Nearly 40 percent of the polling stations closed late, exposing voters who were still waiting to cast their ballots to information about official vote counts in other districts, Chang told a news conference, adding that the integrity of some elections had been compromised.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) filed suit to annul the election, saying many voters had been influenced by information about the state of the race.
Photo: Chung Li-hua, Taipei Times
The Taipei District Court in May ruled against Ting, who has filed an appeal against the decision.
Chang and another Control Yuan member, Yang Fang-ling (楊芳玲), were in charge of the body’s inquiry into the commission’s preparations for the election.
The CEC was aware that local election boards had failed to fully implement its guidelines for the 2016 elections, yet it issued the same set of guidelines in August last year, without taking additional action to ensure compliance, Chang said.
When it became known that 10 referendum proposals would be on the ballot, the commission found itself unable to cope, he said.
While the CEC held 192 simulated votes that showed voters would be swamped by the multitude of and unfamiliarity with referendums, the commission did not act on those problems, he said.
As a result, those simulations were little more than an exercise in futility and a waste of time and effort, he added.
Furthermore, the Election Situation Center that the commission established confined its activities on voting day to summing up vote count returns and writing two news releases, which had nothing to do with its intended role of responding to issues at hard-pressed polling stations, he said.
Many stations were serving too many voters, with limited space and poorly arranged traffic flow, he said, citing as an example a station in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), which had just 3.5 ping (11.6m2) of floor space.
The Control Yuan said the commission should consider the number of voters per polling station, floor space and traffic flow when planning for elections, he said.
Additionally, the commission should give serious thought to increasing the number of paid poll workers, build up a reserve workforce, and consider giving them better pay and benefits, he said.
CEC Vice Chairman Chen Chao-chien (陳朝建) said his agency has acknowledged its mistakes and is taking action to address them, including adding more stations, improving flow and increasing physical barriers for referendum ballot boxes.
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