Referendum planning a travesty of
democracy By Laurence
Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan's holding of its first
national referendum on Saturday has been cast by the
ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose
President Chen Shui-bian is up for re-election the same
day, as a triumph for democracy in Taiwan - whatever the
outcome. But there are major flaws in the referendum
process and the degree to which these flaws are
exploited by the opposition will be an essential
indicator of the degree to which the "pan-blue alliance"
of the formerly authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) and its
smaller ally, the People First Party (PFP) are really
committed to democratic values. This will be all the
more significant, of course, if Chen loses his election
fight and the opposition pan-blues retake power.
Taiwan's passage of its Referendum Law in
November brought to a close a 15-year fight to turn a
constitutional provision allowing referendums into an
acceptable law that spells out who can call them, when,
how and in what circumstances they are to be considered
valid and binding. The new law, however, did not deal
with the technicalities of the voting procedure. That
has been up to the administrative wisdom of the Central
Election Commission (CEC), a cabinet-level body, to
organize.
Hitherto the Central Election
Commission has enjoyed an impressive reputation for
efficiency. Taiwan vote counting is very fast - it
should take only three and a half hours to count the 12
million votes cast in Saturday's presidential election -
and, for a country with Taiwan's history of corrupt
election practices, the CEC is impressively honest (the
corruption taking place before the votes are cast).
In designing the rules for the balloting on
Saturday, however, the CEC has covered itself with
ignominy, reversing itself on just about every aspect of
the balloting at least once - having, as one foreign
journalist described it "more flip-flops than a Spanish
beach holiday" - and has ended up with a procedure that
has been excoriated by international experts.
Complications: Each voter gets three
ballots By running the referendum in tandem with
the presidential election, the government left the CEC
with the task of working out how to give each voter
three ballot papers - the referendum has two questions
with a separate ballot for each - and making sure they
fill them in correctly and put them into the right
boxes.
This proved to be no simple task, and it
was severely complicated by the opposition of the
pan-blues to the entire referendum process and their
encouragement to local election officials to break the
law by refusing to cooperate with the CEC. When the
officials realized that they would face five-year jail
terms if they listened to the pan-blues, their blatantly
illegal initial position was modified to simply being as
obstructive to the Central Election Commission as
possible.
Originally the CEC wanted voters to
pick up all three ballots in the same place and cast
them in the same place. This, the commission said, was
the only way to ensure complete ballot secrecy. What the
CEC feared - and what might well come to pass - was that
since the pan-blues were campaigning not against voting
"yes" in the referendum but against taking part in it at
all, even picking up the ballot papers - to separate
voting for the president and the referendum into two
distinct processes - would enable observers to see who
voted for the referendum against the pan-blues' wishes
and who didn't.
This matters, since in Taiwan
patron-client politics has never been eradicated and
there are various types of coercion used at election
time. Because of the nature of the secret ballot,
however, this patron-client coercion has slowly been
declining in effectiveness. Company bosses will, for
example order their employees to vote in a particular
way and then examine their ID cards afterwards to make
sure they voted. Given that the ID card records that a
person voted but not of course how they voted, this was
mere bluster to the disobedient employee, though
undoubtedly rumors that "they" could find out what one
did in the voting booth have influenced the more timid
in the past.
Grumpy polling officials
unlikely to help voters The problem for the CEC
was that while local election officials, most of whom
are in the pan-blue camp, might have stuck strictly to
the letter of the law as to how polling might take
place, the novelty of the process might require help and
explanation to the voters - which the disgruntled
election officials might not see fit to provide, leading
to confusion, miscast ballots and anger.
In
effect, the Central Election Commission has, through a
number of about-faces on previously announced policies,
given in to the obstructionists for the sake of having
the voting process go reasonably smoothly. After
announcing that collection of all ballot papers would be
in one place at one time and voting would be in one
booth, it changed its procedure so that now voters much
pick up a presidential ballot and cast it, then pick up
the referendum ballots and cast those.
The CEC
also originally said that miscast ballots - those put in
the wrong box - would be counted. In all fairness it
might be said that this was a bit of a sleight of hand
on the government's part; it was, in fact, a way of
maximizing the referendum vote, which by a quirk of the
Referendum Law needs one half of all eligible voters to
cast ballots in order for the vote to be considered
valid. Both the pan-blues and legal experts, however,
quickly pointed out that it was against the law to
deliberately miscast one's ballot - though in fact
people are hardly ever prosecuted for doing so.
Nevertheless, a miscast ballot was an illegal ballot and
how, they asked, could illegal ballots be counted as
valid ballots?
This caused another flip-flop as
the CEC reversed itself, and said that miscast ballots
would not be counted.
Final ignominy:
Anti-referendum propaganda okay The final
ignominy for the CEC came as a result of a part of the
Presidential Election and Recall Law that prohibits
people on election day from displaying campaign material
for any specific candidate within 30 meters of a polling
station. Yet the CEC will allow people to wear stickers
and items of clothing encouraging others not to vote in
the referendum into the polling stations themselves.
If this seemed blatantly contradictory, CEC
chairman Huang Shih-cheng defended himself by saying
that the law forbids campaign material relating to
candidates but the law covering referendums has no such
provision. As long as people do not try in any other way
to persuade others not to vote, they may wear what they
like.
What has bothered many commentators is
that there is nothing to prevent anti-referendum
election officials from wearing anti-referendum
stickers, and many feel that this falls far from the
standards of impartiality that such officials should
display.
But the biggest concern is with the
two-stage voting process. On KMT opposition to the
referendum, Bruno Kaufmann, president of the Initiative
and Referendum Institute in Europe and a leading
international expert on referendums, told a news
conference on Thursday: "With the current arrangement
where voters need to line up separately to vote in the
referendum, voters will be forced to reveal whether they
support the referendum or not to others at the voting
stations. This is a procedural problem that needs to be
addressed."
Others are also concerned. Bo
Tedards, of the Taiwan Network for Free Elections, wrote
in a local paper: "The adoption of the KMT-promoted
'two-stage' voting ... significantly facilitates party
and faction operatives in and around polling stations to
monitor whether voters are participating in the
referendum.
"Given the former prevalence of
vote-buying, intimidation and other forms of pressure
(by employers, for example), there is every reason to be
concerned that these time-honored tactics could be
brought to bear on the issue of participation in or
boycott of the referendum. It is quite possible that
voters, especially those who have previously experienced
such pressure, may well adjust their choices as a
result," Tedards wrote.
As to what actually will
happen, voting day will show. But in the run up to the
poll, there was significant anger toward the government
on the part of referendum supporters who see the CEC as
having compromised the "free and fair" nature of the
referendum for the sake of placating opposition from
election officials who are actually opponents of the
referendum process.
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