More than 83 percent of the nation’s 23 million people are eligible to vote in the local elections in November, including 760,000 first-time voters, the Central Election Commission (CEC) said yesterday.
In the nine-in-one elections on Nov. 26, voters will be electing 11,023 public officials at all levels of local government, CEC Chairperson Lee Chin-yung (李進勇) said shortly after the commission published a notice for candidate registration.
Registration will be open from Monday to Friday next week for candidates for special municipality mayors and councilors, county commissioners and councilors, indigenous district representatives and councilors, township mayors and councilors, and borough wardens or village chiefs, the notice said.
Photo copied by Wang Jung-hsiang,Taipei Times
About 19.3 million Taiwanese — or more than 83 percent of the population — aged 20 or older are eligible to cast their ballots, including 760,000 first-time voters, it said.
Alongside the local government elections, a national referendum on whether the voting age should be lowered to 18 is to be held.
If the referendum passes, it would require an amendment to the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution to lower the voting age to 18.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
The threshold for passage of the referendum is a “yes” vote by at least 50 percent of the nation’s 19.3 million eligible voters, which is double the 25 percent approval required in referendums on non-constitutional issues.
The 113-seat Legislative Yuan on March 25 voted 109-0 to send the issue to a referendum.
The ROC Constitution has been amended seven times since it was ratified in 1947. The most recent change was in 2004 to dissolve the National Assembly and pass on its power of constitutional amendments to the electorate.
The CEC is to employ about 300,000 people to work at an estimated 17,648 polling stations nationwide, Lee said.
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
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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