Residents in Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) yesterday voted to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taoyuan City Councilor Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇).
Taoyuan City Election Commission data showed that 84,582 people voted in favor of the recall, while 7,128 voted against it.
Voter turnout was 28 percent, it showed.
Photo: Lee Jung-ping, Taipei Times
The votes of at least 25 percent of eligible voters — 81,940 people — and the largest share of votes in favor of a recall are required for a recall motion to pass, according to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法).
Wang, 32, was first elected as city councilor in 2014, with the second-highest votes among all candidates for Jhongli. He at the time represented the Green Party Taiwan.
He was in 2018 re-elected with the third-highest number of votes.
In January last year, he left the Green Party and a month later joined the DPP.
Hope Media executive officer Tang Ping-jung (唐平榮), a Jhongli resident who proposed the recall campaign said that Wang did not work for the benefit of his constituency.
The campaign was supported by local Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) members.
Wang pushed his own opinions on public issues, instead of listening to those who he was elected to represent, Tang said after the vote, celebrating with KMT and TPP members at the headquarters of the campaign.
It is the first time that a city councilor in one of Taiwan’s six special municipalities is recalled, he said.
DPP spokeswoman Yen Juo-fang (顏若芳) said that despite the vote being a local issue, “the KMT threw its whole weight behind it.”
“The campaign was aimed to sow division among Taiwanese. This does not bode well for the nation’s democracy, and most people did not like to see this,” she said.
The KMT in a statement congratulated the “people of Jhongli for sending a strong signal.”
“It was a good result and benefits Taiwan’s democratic development,” the KMT said.
As of press time, Wang had not commented on the recall vote.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiao-kuang
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