To Protect Election From China, Taiwan Disenfranchises Thousands Of Voters
Among those kept from voting as a result are police officers and medical workers who can’t leave their posts.
(Bloomberg) -- Shielding Taiwan’s elections from potential interference by China is such a concern for the self-governing democracy that it’s been willing for years to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible voters to do so.
What bars so many from casting ballots is Taiwan’s insistence that all voting be done in person, a rule that’s been in place since the island of 23 million people first began direct elections almost three decades ago.
Among those kept from voting as a result are police officers and medical workers who can’t leave their posts. It also means Taiwanese living abroad must take time off from work and buy air tickets if they want to vote. Taiwan’s diaspora totaled some 2 million people, including children, in 2022, according to the island’s Overseas Community Affairs Council.
The value of this system, though, is that it is hard to infiltrate. It’s a concern that can’t be discounted ahead of a hotly-contested presidential election slated for Saturday and with China, which claims Taiwan as its territory, regularly reiterating its goal of bringing the island under Beijing’s control.
“It is hard to hack a system based on paper ballots placed in a box that are counted that afternoon with the public welcome to watch,” said Margaret Lewis, a professor at Seton Hall University Law School. “The more Taiwan moves away from this straightforward system, the more it opens up the possibility for diminished trust in election results.”
Taiwan’s government has issued numerous warnings about Chinese efforts to influence the island’s election. In December, Taiwanese Cabinet spokesperson Lin Tze-luen told reporters in Taipei that authorities had detained eight people for allegedly violating anti-infiltration laws. Ahead of local elections in 2022, Taiwanese law enforcement raided four locations and detained three people on suspicions they were involved in vote buying linked to China.
While concern about foreign interference in elections isn’t unique to Taiwan, the lack of absentee balloting does put it in the minority. A study of 262 political systems conducted by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found it was one of only 53 that required in-person voting.
Several local politicians, including Cynthia Wu, the Taiwan People’s Party’s vice presidential nominee in Saturday’s election, have advocated for change. Indeed, all of the island’s major political parties have expressed support for reform. There are, however, key differences in how they want the rules changed.
The ruling Democratic Progressive Party, for example, has argued that only those living in Taiwan and unable to vote in person should get absentee ballots. Up to 2 million people in Taiwan would be eligible for such voting, Lee Chin-yung, chair of Taiwan’s Central Election Commission, said in 2021.
The DPP, which has had fraught relations with Beijing, has argued that allowing absentee voting outside Taiwan would favor the opposition Kuomintang, which advocates greater engagement with China. That argument centers around Taiwanese businesspeople who live in China, often referred to as “Taishang,” who are thought to be mostly KMT supporters.
In 2008, Lai Ching-te, the DPP’s candidate for president in this election, penned an article questioning whether “Taishang,” would be able to vote “out of free will.” On Tuesday, Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister in the current DPP administration of President Tsai Ing-wen, accused Beijing of offering lower airfares to encourage businesspeople to return to vote.
While the KMT does hold events in China to drum up support, the other parties also look for help from overseas. The DPP, for example, conducted events in Southeast Asia, Australia, the US and Europe ahead of this election.
KMT Vice Chair Andrew Hsia, who last month visited five Chinese cities to corral support for the party’s candidate Hou Yu-ih, further defended such activities as encouraging people to exercise their democratic rights. He also cautioned in an interview that there’s no promise of a windfall. “Nobody can say with any certainty” how many will return to vote, he said.
Voters returning from abroad didn’t seem to hurt the DPP in the last presidential election in 2020, when Tsai won in resounding fashion, defeating the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu by more than 2.6 million votes. Tsai won by an even larger margin of 3 million votes in 2016, though in the 2012 election, the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou defeated Tsai by less than 800,000 votes.
In spite of the hassle, there are a fair number of Taiwanese who do return to vote, though there is no reliable data on how many exactly. One such voter is Hou-ying Li, a 38-year-old data analyst who lives in New York and decided to spend $1,500 to fly back in time to support the KMT. “For national elections I usually go back,” he said. “Local elections I’m fine to skip.”
Others are staying away. Daniel Chen, a 34-year-old telecommunications worker also living in New York said it was just too difficult to get time off from work. Instead, he gave $1,000 to the campaign of Ko Wen-je, presidential candidate for the third-party TPP. Chen also thinks fewer voters will return this election than in 2020, when pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong heightened fears that Taiwan would face a similar fate.
“That kind of immediate anxiety about China making Taiwan the next ‘Hong Kong’ is not that strong,” Chen said. “We don’t think war in Taiwan will actually happen that soon.”
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