THE ENDLESS DEBATE regarding one-step or two-step voting is not merely a small technicality. The Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) stubbornness in insisting on two-step voting is worth a close look.
Some say the KMT was able to rule Taiwan for 50 years because in addition to the military, police and white terror, they also relied on vote buying and lies.
This is commonly said and also a "truth" passed down by our elders: The KMT wouldn't know how to run an election without vote buying. In the 50 years of its rule, the KMT built an extremely detailed network for township, village and borough chiefs, as well as agricultural and fishing association and trade union officials who were all important vote captains during elections.
According to the book A Confession of Bribery, written by a former KMT official, the function of a vote captain is to follow community registers and spend money at strategic moments to lock in votes, making it easy to estimate the number of votes prior to the election. The mystery of two-step voting, where ballots are received separately, is that it makes it simple to count the number of people who do not participate in the referendum, to report the performance back to those above, and to grasp whether the referendum will be passed.
The Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) push for reclaiming stolen party assets hits the nail on the head. The party assets are its life-blood, hence the draft statute governing stolen party assets has repeatedly failed to pass through the legislature. After East and West Germany united, Germany immediately passed legislation liquidating the party assets of the East German Communist Party -- good example of transitional justice.
In a self-proclaimed democracy like Taiwan, how can a party with assets worth billions and a party heavily in debt compete on equal footing? Can this be considered democracy?
The point of the referendum on reclaiming party assets is to force the legislature to pass the statute governing stolen party assets so that the assets can be returned to the nation by means of the will of the nation.
Due to the two-step voting procedure during the first referendum in 2004, many people were deprived of their referendum rights -- most Taiwanese failed to receive referendum ballots. Using two-step voting is a diversionary tactic used to lower the rate of voter participation and thus lower the possibility the referendum will be passed.
The "red-shirt army" is an anti-President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) movement, not a democratic movement. One-step voting is a 100 percent democratic movement. The first step to democratic progress is to allow the public to directly express their opinion on civic issues so that contentious matters are resolved through referendums. That is a democratic movement.
Hence we must appeal to the Taiwanese public to demand their city and county councilors fight pan-blue city and county councils on this issue and demand that mayors, county commissioners and county election councils restore their civic rights. If you are an incumbent legislator or a legislative candidate, please stand up for one-step voting.
Taiwan is currently in the midst of a democratic civil war. We have the power to resist despotism and move confidently toward one-step voting so that democracy can progress. Taiwan can only become a truly democratic nation if the public can directly express its opinions through referendums and use them to demonstrate the nation's collective will. This wave of democracy has come just in time.
Michelle Wang is the deputy secretary-general of the Northern Taiwan Society.
Translated by Angela Hong
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