Casting invalid ballots has become an instrument of the people, the spokesman of a group called Millions of Invalid Votes Project said while commenting on the unusually high number of invalid ballots in Saturday's presidential election.
"If we are not happy with the current authorities or the alternative provided, why should we be forced to make a decision?" group spokesman Cheng Tsun-chi (鄭村棋) said yesterday.
To bring attention to public discontent with the candidates in the election, the project and its partner the Alliance of Fairness and Justice, also known as the pan-purple alliance, encouraged voters to spoil their ballots in protest.
The high number of invalid ballots in Saturday's election, 337,297, or 2.5 percent of the total ballots cast, was one of the "suspicions" the pan-blue camp raised in their move to annul the election.
"We do not accept any government that abuses its power. The invalid ballot is a weapon and an instrument of the people," Cheng said.
Supporters of the alliance were asked to spoil their ballots by stamping the photos of the candidates on the mouths to indicate disgust with the empty promises and corruption of both the pan-green and pan-blue camps.
Both groups had expressed disappointment in the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) policies on social issues, unemployment, tax and the use of the country's resources.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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