Jonathan Swift describes a war between the Big-endians and the Little-endians in his Gulliver’s Travels.They went to war against each other because they couldn’t agree on the question whether eggs should be broken at the big or small ends.The Taiwanese version of the mini-war on Lilliput is being fought now.
The battleground is the supposedly independent Central Election Commission.Founded under the Executive Yuan or the Cabinet in 1982, the Commission is in charge of holding and supervising all elections, local as well as national.The ruling Democratic Progressive Party has a majority of commissioners, one of them serving as chairman of the Commission.Under pressure from the ruling party, the Commission has decided to hold altogether four referendums alongside two national elections early next year, triggering the confrontation with the opposition Kuomintang and its ally People First Party.Voters will go to the polls to elect a new Legislative Yuan on January 12 and a new president on March 22.
The opposition objects to the referendum-election linkage.The Kuomintang remembers how two referendums held together with the presidential election of 2004 helped Chen Shui-bian get reelected.The ruling party, of course, wants to repeat its referendum gimmick to win a majority in the new legislature and help Frank Hsieh succeed President Chen.
Buoyed by the win in the first skirmish, the Commission is planning to get more voter participation in the referendums by requiring the electorate to get all blank ballots at one stop.Two desks were set up at every polling station for the 2004 election-cum-referendums.Voters received ballots for the election at one desk, voted, and then could refuse to go to the second desk to get ballots for the referendums.As a result, less than half of the voters obtained referendum ballots.To be valid, a referendum has to be voted on by more than half of the electorate.So the Commission that had to invalidate the 2004 referendums now wants only one desk to hand out all blank ballots, every one of which, cast or not, counts towards the half-electorate quota.
This one-stop approach deeply offends the opposition.Commissioners appointed at the recommendation of the Kuomintang and the People First Party insist that voters receive ballots at two desks just as they did three and a half years ago.They advance their two-stop plan for issuing ballots, claiming it alone could prevent confusion at the polls.All 18 cities and counties the opposition controls stand united in defying the Commission.They threaten to go their own way, if the Commission adopts the one-stop policy.In a joint statement, all 18 local election commission chiefs – they are mayors and magistrates of as many cities and counties, including the three on the offshore islands of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu – said they would make voters stop twice to get ballots in total disregard of the Commission’s decision to the contrary.
The battle line is drawn.Faced with the strong opposition, the Commission seems to waver.Chang Cheng-hsiung, chairman of the Commission, was forced to defer the decision to adopt the one-stop plan on Friday and promised to call a public hearing before he calls a vote on how to handle the distribution of blank ballots.No dates have been fixed, however.
As a matter of fact, the best option open to the Commission is to scrap its previous decision to call the referendums at the same time with the elections.Two of the four referendums are over government corruption and recovery of what are known as ill-gotten property and assets of the Kuomintang.Of course, they deserve to be voted on, but the other two, both for Taiwan’s admission to the United Nations, are ludicrous and opposed by Washington and Beijing.The United States has gone on the record by saying the referendum sponsored by the ruling party is a move to unilaterally change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait.The Americans imply that it is detrimental to the peace and stability of the region.Beijing regards the referendum on accession to the United Nations in the name of Taiwan, if passed, as Taipei’s declaration of de jure independence.China vows to take Taiwan back to its fold by force, if Taipei declares independence, but its president Hu Jintao has refrained from threatening to have his People’s Liberation Army invade the island at once.
From President Chen’s vantage point, the UN referendum isn’t ludicrous.He believes it would raise turnout of voters and increase the odds of the ruling party’s standard bearer, albeit of dubious help to its candidates for the Legislative Yuan.He needs Frank Hsieh’s victory over Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang.Should Ma win, Chen would have to follow in the footsteps of two former presidents of South Korea.Roo Tae Woo and Chun Doo Hwan are in jail.
On the other hand, the Kuomintang has no need whatsoever to call for the referendum on a return to the world body as the Republic of China.Everybody knows it’s impossible for Taiwan to win UN membership under whatever name, so long as China keeps its permanent representative’s seat in the Security Council, but the opposition party believes it would lose the presidential race if the version of its opponent alone were voted on.
But the fact is that both UN referendums belittle the wisdom of all swing voters.Accounting for close to a third of the electorate, these voters, middle class and intellectual, won’t dance to the tune of President Chen.They stayed away from the 2004 referendums, and Chen won reelection thanks to sympathy votes cast after a mystery-shrouded election-eve shooting, which was rumored as a Beijing-orchestrated attempt to assassinate him.They will stay away again next year or turn out in droves to help Ma beat Hsieh.A larger turnout this time around will benefit the Kuomintang candidate for president.
All this makes one conclusion inevitable.Whichever side wins, the outcome of Taiwan’s mini-war on Lilliput little affects the race for the nation’s highest public office that, however, may be swayed by a last-minute surprise President Chen, who now doubles as chairman of the ruling party, may reveal like the two bullets a mysterious sniper fired against him and his vice president Annette Lu in Tainan on March 19, 2004.
（本文刊載於96.10.29 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
