Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Fu Kun-chi/Facebook
THE KMT’S RECALL campaigns against the DPP have hit a hurdle, with a number of signatures for the recall petitions disqualified.
Many pan-Blue recall campaigns against DPP legislators have had over 1,000 signatures found to be invalid. This has primarily been due to inconsistent residency periods with voting districts, though others were because signatories were civil servants. Over a hundred signatures for each recall petition against DPP politicians were found to be from deceased individuals, meaning that there are over 1,000 signatures overall for pan-Blue recall campaigns against DPP legislators have been found to be from the deceased.
To date, 12 recall campaigns against DPP legislators have not cleared the first stage for recall campaigns, and will be required to submit additional documentation. By contrast, 32 recalls submitted against pan-Blue legislators have all cleared the first stage to date.
The Central Election Commission has received 64 recall campaign submissions. The recall campaigns were submitted before new rules pushed through by the KMT mandating ID checks for petition signatures, a means of voter disenfranchisement of the kind seen the world over, such as long been contested in the US by voter rights advocates.
The current state of play means that recalls are ongoing against all KMT legislators, with the exception of in deep-Blue Kinmen and Matsu, are progressing as scheduled. Indeed, from the overall outlook on recall campaigns, it is clear that recall campaigns against pan-Blue legislators are moving faster than recall campaigns against pan-Green legislators, while pan-Blue recalls are encountering issues due to fraud.
To begin with, it was the pan-Green camp that set into motion the series of campaigns against pan-Blue politicians. The issue at hand that set off this series of recalls is the KMT and TPP’s attempts to drastically cut the national budget for next year, freeze the Constitutional Court, and raise the benchmark for referendums to be binding.
Photo credit: Eric Chu/Facebook
As such, there are several reasons why the pan-Blue camp is not leaning as hard into attempting to recall the DPP. For one, the KMT and TPP may be banking on making a legal case in the Constitutional Court for the benchmarks they institute for referendums to apply to the current set of referendums.
That is, the right to recall is a constitutional right in Taiwan. That the KMT sought to institute ID checks and significantly raise the benchmarks for referendums is likely to be the object of a ruling in the Constitutional Court case, in that this can be understood as depriving citizens of their constitutional right to recall.
It could be that the KMT may not wish to invest too much resources in recalls, then, because they may be banking on a ruling in their favor–even if there is reason to believe that this could actually play out in the opposite manner. Or it may be that the KMT simply has a party machine that is not operating strong enough to acquire the necessary signatures for recalls. Likewise, one notes that if the KMT is able to recall DPP legislators, this will not significantly change the balance of power in the legislature, in that this is already in their favor.
Indeed, there are some DPP seats that could potentially be recalled by the KMT due to being from pan-Blue demographics, even if the slow pace of signature collection by the pan-Blue camp means that they will need to step up efforts to collect signatures quickly before the legal deadlines if they hope to do so. By contrast, the pan-Green camp is attempting to recall pan-Blue legislators in precarious areas where the pan-Blue camp barely won the last set of elections.
What is clear is that the pan-Green camp has more momentum behind its recall campaigns. Likewise, there has been a pattern of the pan-Blue camp encountering issues with fraud as part of its campaigns, as also observed in incidents such as stolen identity documents being used for the application of a recall petition in Chiayi. This may not be surprising, given how the KMT maintained political power in Taiwan for decades using vote buying as well as leveraging clientelist and patronage networks.
One notes that during Terry Gou’s independent run for president, the Gou campaign encountered legal issues in the form of vote buying by signature collectors, with even the Pingtung County Council speaker implicated in vote buying. It may be that the pan-Blue camp, which should otherwise have no issue collecting the signatures needed for the first round of recalls, is taking shortcuts that rely on vote buying and fraud, and this is not panning out well for the pan-Blue camp.
Still, the pan-Blue camp is likely to seek to rally up its base by accusing the DPP of electoral inference, if its recall campaigns encounter legal issues or fail to meet benchmarks. In the meantime, there have also been cases of pan-Green businesses facing harassment over participating in recall campaigns, such as fire and water safety inspections being called for such businesses.