Swing voters are by and large apolitical.Like yuppies in the United States and “salary” men in Japan, swing voters in Taiwan are mostly college-educated, intellectual middle-class professionals.They account for roughly a quarter of the electorate.Most of them stay away, while other voters turn out in droves to go to the polls to elect mayors, magistrates, lawmakers and presidents.
Why don’t they exercise their Constitutional right of election? The answer is not far to seek.It’s because they are, if anything, cynics at heart.They are knowledgeable enough to understand practically all politicians are crooks.They know whatever campaign promises the politicians make, aside from pork barrel projects and outright government-funded bribes to voters in the form of allowances and compensation, won’t be kept.They also know government corruption isn’t an isolated case found only in Taiwan now.Well, corruption is worldwide and has persisted since mankind formed the first government.So, please tell me for whatever reason these cynics among us should vote in those politicians they disdain.
They, along with the majority of the voters, are facing up to two national elections.A new Legislative Yuan or parliament has to be elected on January 12 next year.President Chen Shui-bian has to bow out on May 20, and a successor has to be elected on March 22, close to two months earlier.
Do the swing voters excuse themselves again just as they used to do?
Of course, it’s next to impossible to predict their turnout, but the chances are that they would stay away again from the legislative elections but would cast their ballots to decide who will succeed President Chen.
Their absence from the general election will little affect its outcome.Altogether 428 candidates are vying for 113 seats at stake. Of them 79 will be elected “regional” lawmakers, one each from a single constituency.Six of the 79 seats are reserved for aborigines.The remaining 34 are legislators at large.Come January 12, a voter is required to cast two ballots, one for a candidate and the other for a party.Lawmakers at large will be chosen from among the candidates recommended by political parties according to proportional representation.The voters will also be asked to vote on two referendums: one for recovery of unlawfully obtained assets of the Kuomintang and the other against government corruption.Needless to say, both are uncalled-for referendums.Swing voters are most likely to refuse to vote, but the rest of the electorate will follow their professed inclination to vote into office those politicians, most of them veterans.As a result, the opposition Kuomintang needs little help from swing voters to retain a parliamentary majority.
The presidential race is a different story.The Kuomintang fields Ma Ying-jeou, a mainlander.His Democratic Progressive Party rival Frank Hsieh is a Taipei-born native islander.They need support of swing voters to win the nation’s highest public office.
Poll after poll has shown Ma leading Hsieh by a large margin in voter support.One popularity survey estimated Ma’s lead at more than 20 percent.Indeed, he would have handily routed Hsieh, if the race had taken on October 10 last year when Shih Ming-teh’s March of One Million Redshirts laid siege to the Presidential Plaza, demanding that Chen Shui-bian step down to take responsibility for a spate of scandals involving himself, his wife, their son-in-law and his close associates.Ma takes pride in being a man of probity.However, he was indicted for corruption charged with misusing his expense account while he was mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006. He was acquitted at the first trial, but the prosecution has appealed.(Unlike in the United States, public prosecutors in Taiwan, where the statutory law is practiced, may appeal a not-guilty verdict.)The Taiwan high court is expected to hand down a verdict on him before the end of this year.If he were convicted, he would be all but doomed, for his Mr. Clean image that alone might induce swing voters to support him is damaged beyond repairs.
Even though the appellate court should turn down the appeal of the prosecution, Ma would have a hard time extenuating his inherited sin of being the son born in Hong Kong of a mainlander Kuomintang apparatchik.Hsieh and his pro-independence DPP supporters have a readymade tag for Ma: the man who is going to sell Taiwan to China.The Kuomintang standard bearer knows it full well and is doing what he can to show that he is acceding to what he believes is the common will of the people to seek independence for Taiwan.Public opinion surveys indicate at least 75 percent of the voters want independence.There are at least a fifth of the people, almost all of them mainlanders, who favor eventual unification with China.But the fact is that only a minority, perhaps no more than 20 percent of all the voters, are hardcore independence supporters.By far the great majority of the people in Taiwan prefer the status quo.All swing voters belong to this majority.In fact, they don’t care whether Taiwan will gain independence or be brought back to China’s fold.They are highly individualistic, caring only about their own well-being.They have no zeal of revolutionaries.They have no cause to fight for.They could care less what government they would live under, so long as they can live their comfortable middle-class life.
In his 2008 campaign, Ma seems to forget swing voters are apolitical.He is trying to woo them by distancing himself from the anti-independence voters.That’s why he wants a referendum for Taiwan’s return to the United Nations as the Republic of China immediately after the ruling party proposed one on accession to that world body as Taiwan.He has also declared he would not start dialogue with Beijing over unification, if he were elected.He doesn’t know he is doing disservice to himself.He is alienating his mainlander supporters, while failing to rally swing voters behind him.
When Hsieh plays his “hate-China” card, Taiwan’s swing voters, most of them Hoklo and Hakka islanders who haven’t forgotten the bloody February 28 Incident of 1947, will be emotionally roused to vote overwhelmingly, if not en masse, for anybody but a Chinese mainlander on next March 22.
（本文刊載於96.11.26 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
