Taipei-based dentist Dory Cheng did not vote in the presidential and legislative elections on Jan. 13, as going to her registered residence in Taichung to cast her ballot would take too much time and money.
“To go home and vote, I would first have to take the high-speed rail, with round-trip tickets costing about NT$1,500. After arriving in Taichung, I would need to take a taxi if I was in a hurry, which would cost me an extra NT$200,” Cheng said.
She works every Saturday and needs to get back to work on Monday morning, she said, adding that such a quick trip to her hometown in central Taiwan is tiring.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
“People who really want to vote should make an effort to do so,” she added. “But it [absentee voting] would give an alternative to people who cannot vote because of work and studies.”
Cheng was one of about 5.5 million people who were eligible to vote, but skipped last month’s elections, based on Central Election Commission (CEC) data.
About 5,000 of those voters were military service members who were on duty on election day, the Ministry of National Defense said.
The rest included election workers, law enforcement personnel, voters who study or work overseas, people with physical disabilities and prisoners who are not disfranchised.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have proposed a bill that would allow absentee voting, which they said would protect people’s constitutional right to participate in politics — and benefit about 2 million people.
The draft act would allow people to vote by mail or cast their absentee votes in ballot boxes prepared by election authorities. People who choose to vote by mail must put their ballots in a specifically designed envelope, which must be delivered to authorities before the election day, the draft act says.
Absentee votes would be counted separately from ballots cast on the election day and would be added to total vote counts, it says.
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator-at-large Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said too many people forfeit their right to vote because of the nation’s imperfect election system, adding that many countries have already implemented an electronic voting system.
The Cabinet on Thursday passed a draft bill that, if approved by the Legislature, would allow Taiwanese to vote from outside their constituencies during national referendums.
Eligible voters have to apply to the CEC through paper forms or an online system for permission to vote in absentia during a referendum, a minimum of 60 days before the vote, according to the draft bill.
Chu Chao-hsiang (曲兆祥), a retired professor of National Taiwan Normal University’s Graduate Institute of Political Science, said the voting should be a right available to all people, as stated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Depriving the political rights of people disproportionately due to some technical issues is unacceptable, he said.
“Unless the government thinks Taiwan is not bound by this covenant because it has a formidable enemy across the Taiwan Strait, all people’s political rights should be protected,” Chu said.
He said that absentee voting had been raised when he was a member of the National Assembly, an abolished representative body that elected the president and vice president before direct presidential elections became available in 1996.
Chu and other National Assembly members, including some Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members, advocated for the implementation of absentee voting.
“In the past, the KMT wanted to block absentee voting. More than 20 years have passed. Even though the DPP is in power, it has done nothing about it but talk,” Chu said.
National Cheng Kung University electrical engineering professor Li Jung-shian (李忠憲) said the KMT and the TPP regarded absentee voting as an indicator of an advanced voting system, but it would actually endanger Taiwan’s national security.
“I only have one question: Would the country accept the election results if absentee ballots become key in deciding the outcome of an election? Would it not cause revolution or lead to an unstable society if people did not accept the results?” Li wrote on Facebook last month.
The most important matter in a democracy is counting votes, which means how they are counted and ways to determine the valid and invalid ones, he added.
The problem with postal voting is that it is difficult to check voters’ identity or trace the sources of votes in real-time, he wrote, adding that people engaging in early voting have no way to change their vote even if they change their mind from the date they send their ballot until election day.
“In theory, it sounds like absentee voting could be helpful to university students who have moved away from their family’s home. In reality, it could be abused to control voters and manipulate election results,” Li wrote.
Beijing could pressure or co-opt Taiwanese based in China through absentee voting to vote for politicians it supports, Li added.
“A peaceful transition of power in a democracy can only occur through a secret ballot system, and an impartial and objective method to count votes,” he said.
“Overall, elections in Taiwan are very credible and stable” he said. “If it is not broken, don’t fix it.”
“A convenient and efficient voting method is not an improvement if it could compromise the credibility of elections,” he added.
There are indeed practical concerns in implementing absentee voting, Chu said.
“Is there a possibility that China could use absentee voting to manipulate Taiwan’s elections? Should Taiwanese be concerned about that? The answer is ‘yes.’ So Taiwanese need to do everything they can to prevent the worst case scenarios from happening.” he said. “CEC would have to recruit experts to address technical issues, but we have to be aware that it is impossible that absentee voting would have zero loopholes.”
The real reason that absentee voting has not been practiced in Taiwan is a lack of trust between the KMT and the DPP, he said.
“The KMT said the DPP purposely blocked the absentee voting bill to prevent it from scoring a legislative victory, while the DPP feared that the KMT would work with the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the DPP,” he said.
The DPP opposed absentee voting in the past when most of the military leaders were KMT members, who was feared to pressure their deputies to vote for KMT candidates, he added.
Nevertheless, Taiwan could initially allow early voting for people who have to work on election days and inmates who are not disenfranchised, Chu said, adding that the final goal would be to implement electronic voting, which would allow Taiwanese citizens based overseas to vote.
A study conducted by the Legislative Yuan in 2016 said that Taiwan should implement absentee voting as soon as possible, because it would increase voting rates and legitimacy of elections.
“Due to the special political environment that Taiwan is facing, the government should first try postal voting or allowing people who cannot return to their registered residence to vote at the polling stations near them,” the report said.
“However, absentee voting for citizens residing overseas should not be implemented without a consensus among political parties and the general public first,” it said.
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