The Central Election Commission (CEC) on Tuesday said it would launch an administrative probe into whether the Nantou County Election Committee’s rejection of recall petition signatures was legal.
The probe was announced after Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians cast doubts on the committee’s decision to reject many signed petitions to recall Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and Yu Hao (游顥).
The CEC called on the Nantou committee, which has said it followed proper procedures, as well as local household registration offices to cooperate with the investigation.
Photo courtesy of the “All Recall Ma” group
Members of a group seeking to recall Ma told a news conference that they had rigorously reviewed the petitions before submitting them, and believed they were in compliance with regulations, but added that the committee had rejected the petitions for vague reasons such as signatures being “scrawled.”
At a separate news conference, members of a group seeking to recall Yu said the Nantou committee lacked consistency and transparency in its handling of petitions.
The DPP, which has backed efforts to recall as many KMT legislators as possible, also said the committee’s actions were not lawful.
DPP Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) said the committee admitted rejecting petitions because of “scrawled signatures” and the handwriting did not match data from household registration agencies.”
“A scrawled signature is not a valid reason to reject a petition, while accessing data from household registration offices to check signatures is a breach of personal data,” Shen said.
DPP Nantou County Councilor Shen Su-cheng (沈夙崢) said she had asked the CEC during the signature collection campaign if the signatures must be written neatly, and the CEC responded that they did not.
The Nantou County Election Committee said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening that it rejected the signatures, because the writing was “incorrect or not clear,” not because they were “scrawled.”
It also said that it referred to household registration data to check registered names, not signatures.
Of the 3,817 signatures rejected in one of the recall cases, 2,385 of them were denied because they were submitted for both the first and second stages of the recall initiation process, which is against the law, the committee said.
Another 571 were deleted for errors in the name or signature columns, it said, adding that it did not find evidence of forgery.
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