Fifty-two-point-one percent of Kaohsiung residents polled said they would vote to remove Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) from office in a recall election, a survey released yesterday by the New Power Party (NPP) showed.
The survey found that 35.2 percent would vote against recalling Han, 9 percent were undecided and 3.7 percent declined to answer.
The Central Election Commission on April 17 announced that a recall vote of Han would be held on June 6 after 377,662 valid petition signatures were submitted to initiate it.
Photo: CNA
At least 25 percent of eligible voters in Kaohsiung would need to vote in favor of a recall, and the ballots cast in support of the motion must exceed the number cast against it for the motion to pass, Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) regulations say.
The commission said that 2,281,338 people were eligible to vote in 2018’s Kaohsiung mayoral election.
The NPP survey showed that 43.6 percent of respondents said they would “definitely” vote in the recall vote, 22 percent said “probably,” 13.6 percent said “probably not” and 13.1 percent said “definitely not.”
Among the respondents, 24.4 percent said they were “not very satisfied” with Han’s overall performance since taking office, while 36.1 percent said they were “very dissatisfied.”
Thirteen percent said they were “very satisfied” with his performance, 18.6 percent said they were “fairly satisfied” and 7.9 percent expressed “no clear opinion,” the survey showed.
The poll was conducted by Trend Survey and Research Co via telephone from April 18 to Monday last week and received 805 valid responses from people in Kaohsiung aged 20 or over.
It had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
People must be 20 or older to vote in a recall vote.
In a separate poll conducted on April 17 and 18, the NPP found that 46.9 percent of respondents chose New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) when asked whose performance among the mayors of the six special municipalities they were “most satisfied” with in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) garnered 12.4 percent of the support, while Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲, 11.4 percent), Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲, 5.4 percent), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕, 4.4 percent) and Han (4.1 percent) were the others.
Fourteen percent said they had “no clear opinion,” while 1.4 percent were dissatisfied with the performance of all six, the second survey found.
The mayors survey, which was also carried out by Trend Survey and Research, collected 813 valid responses from people aged 20 or over and had a margin of error of 3.44 percentage points.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods