Ninety-two reports of alleged breaches of election laws and regulations governing conduct at or around polling stations had been made by 4pm yesterday, the National Police Agency said.
Forty-nine of the incidents involved possession or use of a recording device, 18 incidents concerned the destruction or unauthorized removal of ballots and 13 were over promotion of a political candidate, it said, with nine others classified as miscellaneous offenses.
Police responded to 54 other incidents, but did not deem them to be serious infractions, the agency said.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying, AP
The nation’s 22 electoral management bodies of the Central Election Commission have the final say in deciding whether an incident in their jurisdiction constitutes a prosecutable breach of election laws, it said.
An elevated state of alert was to remain in effect until after all the votes were counted, it said.
Taipei police briefly detained Lee Hui-hsin (李慧曦), a legislative candidate for the Judicial Revolution Party, after a row at a polling station in Wanhua District (萬華), a police spokesperson said.
At about 10am, Lee engaged in a loud and disruptive argument with election workers over the handling of several ballot boxes, which she said were not properly sealed, police said.
Lee did not comply with police officers’ repeated orders for her to vacate the premises and was escorted away following an altercation, they said, adding that the incident is to be handled by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office.
The Tainan City Election Commission said that a false report of a series of stabbings at local polling stations might have been an effort by “external forces” to undermine election integrity.
The report, which was picked up by news media including My Formosa and Chinese Television System News, originated from a Telegram post timestamped 9:19am, the commission said, citing an ongoing investigation by the Tainan Police Department.
The post on the messaging app — which included graphic photographs of injuries to supposed victims — said that more than 10 assailants in a white van were carrying out knife attacks at polling stations in the city, Tainan police officials said.
The Chinese-language report had several characters in simplified form and its content was entirely false, the commission said, adding that the account that first posted the story has since been deleted.
The message has been reported to police and prosecutors as a possible case of election interference, it said.
Separately, a Kaohsiung woman was questioned by police after her two-year-old daughter tore up her ballot in a tantrum at a polling station, the Kaohsiung Police Department’s Fongshan Precinct said.
Election workers had allowed the woman to bring the toddler inside the polling station out of consideration, but called the police when the child destroyed her mother’s ballot to select a party for their legislator-at-large list, it said.
Voters had been urged to leave children six or younger with security guards or election workers instead of bringing them into polling booths, precinct head Tsai Hung-mou (蔡鴻謀) said.
Additional reporting by Chen Wen-chan
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