Taiwan: Recounts, fights, shredded
democracy By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan is suffering its gravest
political crisis in 25 years and on Tuesday three days
after the disputed presidential election, this capital
city was all but paralyzed by supporters of the losing
side, protesting alleged irregularities in voting and
demanding a recount. Both sides, while agreeing in
principle on a recount, are wrangling over how to
organize it, how long it will take and who will do it.
Nobody knows. The law is silent: there has never been a
national recount.
In a sign of how the situation
has deteriorated, a fist fight broke out in the
legislature Tuesday after President Chen Shui-bian,
narrowly reelected Saturday, asked his governing
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to introduce a
revision to the election laws providing for recount. His
proposed amendment would apply retroactively to his own
case and would mandate a recount if the margin of
victory was less than 1 percent.
Chen, who was
shot in an apparent assassination attempt last Friday,
the day before voting, was reelected by a margin of
0.228 percent over his challenger, Lien Chan of the
opposition alliance of the Kuomintang (KMT) and People
First Party (PFP), known as the pan-blues (from the
color of the KMT emblem). The outcome was immediately
rejected by the pan-blue losers. After small riots in
two cities Saturday night and island-wide protests,
Taipei is still in near paralysis.
Depending on
where one stands in Taiwan's political spectrum - either
with Chen's DPP and its allies, the so-called pan-greens
(after the color associated with Taiwan independence) or
the pan-blues - what is happening is either a party that
failed at the ballot box attempting to organize a
"people power"-style coup d'etat, or a party
cheated at the ballot box demanding justice.
However this fracas is eventually resolved, and
only now is it becoming clear how it might be, Taiwan's
reputation as a model democracy has been shredded. This
has major regional implications since it allows
anti-democrats in Hong Kong to inveigh against its
territories moving toward the entirely elected
legislature that it is allowed under the basic law from
2007.
Setback to democratic tendencies in
China It also deals a major setback to vaguer
hopes of democratizing tendencies in China itself,
allowing leaders comfortable with authoritarianism to
exploit traditional Chinese fears of social chaos as a
reason for avoiding political change.
All this
is rather beside the point in Taiwan itself however.
Here the focus is on finding a solution to the current
crisis that prevents it from spiraling into something
much, much worse - ethnic violence or even civil war.
The fist fight on the floor of the legislature
appeared to be a ruse by the pan-blues to force the
president into dropping the idea of a revision to the
law and instead declaring a "state of emergency" - which
to all intents and purposes means martial law - and
using the huge powers such a declaration would give him
to order a recount on his own initiative. The DPP on
Tuesday evening was mulling how to handle this
challenge. It sees the pan-blue proposal as hugely
damaging to the idea of democracy. The irony is that
pan-blues governed under a state of emergency for 38
years in Taiwan's less democratic days.
The DPP
is keen to get a recount under way, it says, since it
has little to fear from the result. Whatever the result,
Chen said at a Tuesday midday news conference, the DPP
will abide by the result. But could the pan-blues give
the same guarantee? As of Tuesday evening, there was no
pan-blue response.
Talk of deepening crisis,
ethnic violence or even civil war is not hyperbole. The
fact that the situation has not turned seriously violent
since Saturday night is largely because of the low-key
attitude of the government. But as the pan-blue protests
continue, the pan-greens are wondering whether they have
to mobilize to protect their victory. "We are waiting
for someone to give the word," one female DPP supporter
told me Tuesday night. "My father and my brother are
waiting for the word."
How responsible are
the pan-blues? Much depends on how responsible
the pan-blues are. So far the evidence is ominous.
Pan-blue demands have shown a lack of logic and the
behavior of the pan-blue leaders has been incendiary.
Their problem is that they have whipped up supporters to
a fever pitch of indignation, promising that they will
not stop their protests until their demands are met -
while the machinery for meeting those demands in
accordance with the law and the constitution is rather
slow, and in some areas totally untested.
This
means that they either hope to force the government to
put aside parts of the election law to deal with the
case speedily, which the greens and even dovish blues -
there are some - see as a victory for mob rule. Or else
they will have to tell their supporters to disperse on
the basis of promises from a government they have spent
the last 72 hours telling their supporters they cannot,
under any circumstances, trust.
The pan-blues
make claims not all of which are consistent either with
the law or with each other, including:
That Friday's assassination attempt might have been
staged to win a sympathy vote for the president and it
was not right for the election to go ahead until all the
details of the affair were known. Because of this they
argue the election should be annulled.
That the margin of the pan-green victory - 30,000
votes out of 12.9 million cast - was so small that the
votes should be recounted.
That the number of spoiled ballots at 310,000 was
unusually high compared with past elections, and the
ballots should be inspected and the votes recounted.
That the government raised the national security
alert level after the president's shooting Friday,
thereby unfairly preventing some 200,000 troops from
voting. The election should be annulled and authorities
should order a new vote in which the troops are allowed
to vote.
That polling stations were badly run and the
vote-counting systematically flawed, and for these
reasons the election should be annulled and another one
called.
Contradiction between recount and
annulment There is obviously a contradiction
between wanting a recount of the ballots and wanting an
election annulled - though pan-greens predictably claim
the pan-blues will try to get the election annulled if a
recount does not go their way. Confusingly, the
pan-blues have launched legal action to bring about both
eventualities.
In a meeting with foreign
journalists Monday night, Lien Chan, KMT chairman and
the pan-blues presidential candidate, seemed to imply
that a recount of the ballot would suffice for the
pan-blues to concede the election if necessary. But it
appeared at the conference that neither he nor his
running mate James Soong, chairman of the PFP, had
actually given thought to the contradictory nature of
their demands.
Taiwan's election laws do have
ways in which the pan-blues' grievances might be
addressed. But some of the complaints are simple
non-starters. For example, an election cannot be
canceled, even after an assassination attempt, unless
the president is killed. So Chen's injury - he had a
deep flesh wound in his stomach - did not constitute
legal grounds for halting the voting Saturday. To have
done what the pan-blues now suggest should have been
done - and it is noteworthy that they made no suggestion
of suspending polling before the election - was illegal.
Some pan-blues likened Chen to Hitler,
Saddam As to the idea that the attack was staged,
that some people would think that Taiwan's president had
himself shot in the stomach to win an election is
comment more on the irrationality whipped up by the
hysterical pan-blue election campaign - which likened
Chen to Hitler and produced posters saying that Osama
bin Laden approved his action and that his call for a
referendum was a tactic he copied from Saddam Hussein.
Former soldiers have pointed out that "shooting to
injure" in the stomach doesn't make any sense
whatsoever.
The complaint that 200,000 service
personnel were unable to vote was a canard laid to rest
Monday by the Ministry of National Defense. The
heightened security status after the assassination did
not affect troop deployment and only some 13,000 troops
were unable to vote as a result if having to be in a
state of combat readiness, which is standard procedure
during a national election. Furthermore, even if the
election were to be annulled and another one called,
under Taiwan's laws (and all these laws were passed by
the KMT when it was in office) only those who voted in
the first election could vote in the second. So the
troops still could not vote and pan-blue demands that
they should be allowed to do so are basically demands
for the government to set aside aspects of the election
law that one of the contenders deems inconvenient.
The pan-blues are on firmer ground when it comes
to irregularities with the voting. But there are a
number of problems for the pan-blues that might well
deny them the overturning of the election result they
seek.
First there is simply no evidence of
widespread tampering with the ballot. Taiwan's vote
counting procedure is one of the most transparent in the
world. Ballot boxes are opened in public. Ballots are
withdrawn one by one and shown to the observers. The
vote is read out and then credited to whichever side it
supports. The openness and generally consensus nature of
the counting - observers can protest if they see
mistakes being made - means there is very little room
for error.
Systemic fraud by DPP
implausible Secondly, the charge that has been
widely believed by gullible visiting journalists, that
the balloting and counting process was in the hands of
the DPP and therefore liable to manipulation, is
nonsense. The balloting and counting is carried out by
local governments, usually using the help, on election
day, of teachers from the schools which are usually
where polling stations are situated. The majority of
these local authorities are pan-blue controlled. A large
number of local government workers are KMT members and,
because of martial law-era discrimination against hiring
native Taiwanese, a very large proportion of teachers
are mainlanders and hard-line pan-blue supporters. The
idea that there was systemic fraud by the DPP within
such a system is highly implausible.
As for the
high number of invalid ballots, Lee Tseng-tsai,
secretary-general of the Kinmen County Election
Commission, told Taiwan's Central News Agency that he
thought the comparatively high ratio resulted from
changes in the election laws passed by the pan-blue
dominated legislature last October. The changes
significantly tightened the criteria for ballot
validity. In the past a ballot was valid if the ink
stamp used to vote was placed not just in the
appropriate box but also either on the number of the
candidate or his picture. The idea was that if an
intention to vote for a particular candidate was clear
the vote would be counted. The reformed law made only
ballots stamped in the proper box meant for the stamp
would be considered valid. The March 20 election was the
first under which this system had been used.
On
top of the new stringency in voting procedures was also
the action of a group of activists the Million Invalid
Ballot Alliance, which was encouraging people to spoil
their ballots as a protest against what they called "an
unfair political system".
In theory what happens
now should now be up to the courts. The pan-blues have
filed their suits against the Central Election
Commission. It should now be up to the courts to decide
if there is a case to answer, hear evidence and make a
judgment whether to annul the election in whole or in
part or whether to order a recount, once again in whole
or in part.
The Central Election Commission
cannot administer the recount since it is the defendant
in the pan-blue's legal suits. Yet the courts have
neither the election-related expertise nor perhaps even
the manpower to administer a recount. Each ballot will
have to be counted in front of a judge or judges and a
panel of observers. Some estimates say that 3,000 judges
will be needed. The head of the Taoyuan County local
government Chu Li-lun, himself a KMT member, estimates
that in his county at least, given the facilities
available, a recount would take a month. And the method
he envisioned, delegating it to the county election
authorities supervised by officers of the High Court, is
far speedier than the pan-blues' preferred method - to
have everything recounted by the High Court centrally in
Taipei.
This story will not be over soon.
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