A total of ten referendum questions are up for the vote in local elections at the end of this month, during which a nationwide referendum will also be held regarding these ten questions. Some confusion remains about how voters will tackle these questions...
With three consecutive weekends in Taipei seeing demonstrations by civil society groups before local elections and national referendums next month, this repeats a familiar pattern of a wave of protests preceding elections in Taiwan...
The Formosa Alliance held a rally this afternoon outside DPP headquarters in Taipei in order to push for a referendum on the name Taiwan will participate in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics under. Organizers claimed that 120,000 were in attendance...
The fact that a current campaign to hold a referendum on a planned coal-burning power plant in Shenao has led to pressure on the DPP is evident in flip-flopping by premier William Lai on the power plant. This has led to accusations of hypocrisy on the part of Lai from the KMT, which was a major force in pushing for the referendum...
Recent dilemmas faced by the Central Election Commission point again to the challenges of holding a political referendum in Taiwan. Namely, in response to the issue that the KMT seems to have forged a large number of signatures for a referendum against a petition to gradually to phase out thermal power plants that the party has been pushing for, the commission has decided to allow the referendum to pass, but to possibly impose criminal penalties on the KMT for forging signatures...
In past months, one has observed a number of conflicting referendum proposals achieving the necessary political benchmarks to be held. The number of referendum proposals currently on the table is inclusive of referendums calling for gay marriage, against gay marriage, for nuclear power, for coal power, and for changing the name under which Taiwan is to participate in 2020 Tokyo Olympics...
The referendum will soon become a highly contested political battleground in Taiwan, with a number of ongoing referendum initiatives likely to qualify for making it onto the ballot in 2018 elections, At this juncture, one can also venture a number of preliminary observations about what the effects of referendum reform in Taiwan have been...
August would be a key period for several referendum pushes in Taiwan at present. Both the Formosa Alliance’s push to achieve a referendum on Taiwan participating in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics under the name “Taiwan” instead of “Chinese Taipei” and an alliance of anti-gay groups hoping to hold a referendum against gay marriage and sexual education they see as encouraging homosexuality aim to reach 280,000 signatures by the end of the month...
With the Central Election Commission announcing that a referendum against same-sex marriage pushed for by anti-gay groups has passed the necessary threshold for a referendum to be held, shock and anger has broken out in Taiwan. However, in itself, it may not be too surprising that anti-gay groups were able to achieve reaching this referendum...
Electoral politics in 2018 elections and beyond stand to be shaken up by the recent formation of the “Formosa Alliance”, which intends to push for reform of the Referendum Act in order to allow for a referendum on amending the name of the nation and settling long-standing issues regarding independence/unification. This referendum push could pose a challenge to the DPP in terms of seizing its traditional base...
