During the second provisional session of the summer recess that began last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature pushed through a number of controversial proposals, including the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and an amendment to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法). This latter move froze the boundaries of legislative electoral districts for the next decade and deserves serious scrutiny.
The amendment invalidates an announcement made by the Central Election Commission (CEC) in May that the number of legislative seats in Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung would be increased and decreased by one respectively for the next legislative election.
Although the KMT said that the amendment, which was initiated by KMT Legislator Lee Fu-hsing (李復興) from Kaohsiung, was meant to stabilize electoral districts, it could just as easly be interpreted as improper interference in the workings of the nation’s supposedly independent top electoral body.
The CEC proposed the adjustment in response to the planned mergers of Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung cities and counties, in accordance with Article 4 of the Amendment to the Constitution, which stipulates that the distribution of legislative seats should be in proportion to the population of special municipalities, cities and counties.
As the population of Greater Tainan may reach 1.8 million after December’s merger, while that of Greater Kaohsiung will become 2.7 million, it makes perfect sense for the CEC to re-demarcate electoral districts to ensure residents are fairly represented.
The freeze not only makes the seat adjustment stipulated by the Constitution impossible for a decade, but also in effect suspends the CEC’s authority to rearrange legislative electoral districts, as empowered by the Organic Act of the Central Eelection Commission (中央選舉委員會組織法), which was pushed through by the KMT in May last year.
In light of this, one cannot but ask whether the KMT’s decision to push through the amendment was motivated by its own political interests.
The KMT holds six of the nine legislative seats in Kaohsiung City and County, but none in Tainan — a traditional Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stronghold.
In terms of turnout for the last legislative election in 2008, the KMT received 30.5 percent of the vote in Tainan County — about 25 percentage points fewer than the DPP — while in Tainan City, the KMT lost to the DPP by 1 percent.
In Kaohsiung City and County, the KMT had a 5 percent lead over the DPP.
Given these figures, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the KMT had much to lose if the commission had gone ahead with its planned re-adjustment of seat allocations.
On Saturday, KMT caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) and five other KMT Kaohsiung legislators accused the DPP caucus of sacrificing the rights of Kaohsiung residents by threatening to file an application for a constitutional interpretation of the amendment.
Needless to say, those legislators conveniently forgot to mention that Tainan residents have the right to be as well represented in the legislature as their counterparts in other parts of the nation.
Instead of passing a controversial amendment that was dubbed “a life-saving bill for Kaohsiung legislators,” the legislature should have spent more time deliberating how to ensure residents from different cities and counties are best represented in that body.
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