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.
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