The Great Taiwan Recount and pan-blue
strategy By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - So was The Great Taiwan Recount a flash
in the pan? Was the furious demand for a recount in the
presidential election just the sound and the fury - that
drove hundreds of thousands of protesters into the
streets - signifying nothing and changing nothing?
In fact, the votes already have been recounted,
President Chen Shui-bian, as expected, is the presumed
winner, and leaked results confirm this; his margin
might have been shaved by 3,000 votes. He already has
been sworn in, but when the results will be announced by
the Taipei High Court is anybody's guess. It could be a
long time; some calculate it could take as long as five
months before all ballots are re-examined by the Taipei
High Court and the official recount results are
announced.
After the presidential election,
which Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won by
29,518 votes - out of more than 13 million cast - a
recount was considered so urgent that Wang Jin-pyng, the
Speaker of the legislature, even suggested declaring a
state of emergency to speed the process.
The
idea was that the state of emergency would suspend
ordinary constitutional processes and give the president
extraordinary powers to initiate the recount by fiat,
rather than wait for the far slower ordinary judicial
process to run its course. In Taiwan, which spent 38
years under martial law as the result of a similar
emergency decree, this was not a suggestion to be made
lightly.
Nor was it a suggestion the government
adopted. The result has been that what was once the only
news item discussed on the island, by the time it began
it was yesterday's cause celebre. While Chen was
sworn in as president on May 20, followed by a new
cabinet taking up their jobs, the result of the recount
- which, after all, has the potential to overturn the
election result, eject Chen and put his very bitter
rival, the Kuomintang's (KMT's) Lien Chan, in his place
- is still not known.
The recount is in itself
only part of the strategy of the opposition "pan-blue
alliance" of the KMT and the People First Party (PFP).
Basically those parties look to the recount to recast
the election result in their favor or, failing this,
they hope the recount process will produce enough
evidence of polling irregularities to have the Taiwan
High Court annul the March 20 election altogether and
order a new one.
So what progress has been
made? Despite the hurry immediately after the
election to get the recount under way, it only actually
began on May 10, just 10 days before Chen was due to be
sworn in for a second term. There were two major reasons
for the delay.
The first was that legal
procedure to bring the recount about - which legislative
Speaker Wang had wanted to circumvent - meant that the
defeated pan-blues had to file a civil lawsuit against
the Central Election Commission for mismanagement of the
election.
The problem was that, under Taiwan
law, the loser of a civil action must pay the costs
involved, and the pan-blues balked at the idea of paying
the NT$60 million (US$1.8 million) the recount was
estimated to cost. Not only that, but they had to hand
over a bond worth that amount to the High Court, to make
sure they would not default on payment, before the
recount could begin. After having tried and failed to
get the government to pay the bill, the pan-blues
eventually handed in the bond on the last possible day
before the High Court canceled the recount.
Another cause of the delay was simply working
out how the recount was going to be administered.
Nothing on this scale had ever been seen in Taiwan and
there were only the vaguest of legal guidelines to go
by. At first the government wanted the Central Election
Commission to carry it out, the CEC being, after all,
the national election administrator and better versed in
ballot-handling and election law than anyone else. The
pan-blues, however, would not accept this, since the CEC
was a defendant in the suit they had brought. Eventually
the High Court judges and the lawyers for the
government, the DPP and the pan-blues had to invent the
method by which to conduct the recount from first
principles. Unsurprisingly, this was not a task to be
swiftly wrapped up.
The system they finally
devised delegated the counting to Taiwan's district
courts, which used multiple teams to go through the
ballots. Each team consisted of a district court judge,
a court clerk, two officials from the CEC and one lawyer
each for the plaintiff and for the defendant. Some
districts had as many as 60 teams working on the
recount. In total, about 2,000 judges and court officers
and 1,500 lawyers were involved, virtually tying up the
island's entire legal machinery for 10 days.
The
process of the recount was simple enough. The ballots
were examined one by one and tabulated to one side or
the other. If there was any dispute about a ballot's
validity, it was to be forwarded to the High Court in
Taipei, where, after the recount had been finished, the
three senior judges overseeing the entire process would
examine each disputed ballot in turn and rule on its
validity.
The actual recount process turned out
to be far less acrimonious than had been expected.
Before it started, the pan-blues issued instructions to
their lawyers, which seemed calculated to slow the
process with constant bickering and interminable
challenges. According to the instructions pan-blue
lawyers had to "have the courage to voice disagreement
and must split hairs trying to find faults". In the end
this was not to be. Lawyers from both sides agreed with
the High Court on a procedure for registering objections
that cut the room for obstruction to the minimum and
gave the courts the right to throw out troublesome
lawyers. The Judicial Reform Foundation, meanwhile,
reminded all lawyers that the Attorney Regulation Act
could be against lawyers making frivolous challenges.
Surprise: Leaks of 'secret'
recount The recount was supposed to be conducted
in secrecy, with no information being released to the
public before the High Court judges finally reached a
verdict. Nevertheless, at least during the counting
process, both sides leaked information. At the
conclusion of the actual recounting it was reportedly
found that Chen's majority had narrowed by some 3,000
votes, as some votes previously deemed valid were
rejected by the judges. There were also some 30,000
disputed ballots on which the High Court judges would
have to rule. The DPP has said it is not worried about
these ballots since about 80 percent of them were, it
claims, for Chen.
The recount has in fact caused
some friction within the government itself since of the
330,000 ballots that were ruled invalid in the first
election-day count, a large majority were, according to
the DPP lawyers, votes for Chen. The votes were deemed
invalid because, unlike past elections in which voters
could place the special chop used to mark ballot papers
either in the proper box or on the picture or number of
the candidate, the rules this time were changed so that
only ballots stamped in the proper box on the paper were
deemed valid. Now it appears that the CEC did not make
this change in the regulations sufficiently understood,
with the result that less well-educated or well-informed
DPP voters voted as they had in the past, with the
result that their votes were wasted. Had the newer more
stringent rules not been adopted, the DPP should have
won the election with a majority of about 100,000, the
party's lawyers claim.
When the judges will
finally rule on the recount is anybody's guess. But it
might not be for a rather long time. Even if the High
Court works with uncommon zeal it is still hard to see
how it could examine more than 250 votes a day, which,
with 30,000 votes to examine, means perhaps five months'
work.
But the opposition pan-blue hopes are not
just based on the simple numbers game of vote counting.
The recount has, they claim, shown enough irregularities
in the way the election was run to have it annulled.
Nonsense, the DPP and the government claim. In anything
as big as a national election there are bound to be
procedural glitches and mistakes, but there is no
evidence whatsoever to show that the number of such
incidents in this election was greater than in the past,
that any of these glitches were intentional or that they
favored one party over another.
The pan-blues,
however, have been paying for information from
"informants" who claim that they were unable to vote
because someone had already voted for them, ie signed
the electoral register in their name and used their
vote. The pan-blues claim this shows a widespread
conspiracy to rig the election, and they want to examine
voter lists and make sure that all those who are
supposed to have voted did in fact vote. The court has
allowed them to do so only in certain limited cases.
Unfair, the pan-blues cry. But the court is well
aware that it is the pan-blues themselves who "rent" ID
cards and then use proxy voters as one method of
vote-buying. The High Court is reluctant therefore to
allow broad access to voter lists because the pan-blues
tactic is the astonishingly audacious one of using
evidence of their own fraudulent practices - which can't
be traced back to them at this juncture - to try to
invalidate the election result.
Audacious, but
is it serious? Many pundits think the pan-blues'
attempts to overturn the election have far more to do
with internal issues within the pan-blue camp than with
any realistic hope of finding themselves in office. To
claim the election was fraudulent and to claim that the
shooting of Chen on the day preceding the election was a
DPP conspiracy to gain "sympathy votes" are ways for the
current pan-blue hierarchy to deny the real meaning of
the election. And that real meaning: their vision for
Taiwan has been rejected and they are now a political
minority that, after losing 11 percentage points of
support in the past four years, needs a radical rethink
if it is not to be marginalized. To say the election was
stolen means not having to accept responsibility for
defeat. But this is a strategy that is beginning to tear
the pan-blue camp apart.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
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