The military has said that measures are to be taken to ensure that Taiwan’s 210,000 military personnel can vote in the Jan. 13 presidential and legislative elections.
That does not include 5,000 personnel who would need to remain on duty to deal with potential emergencies, Captain Lee Chang-fu (李昌富), deputy head of the Ministry of National Defense’s joint operations planning, told a news briefing on Tuesday.
Lee said the number of personnel unable to cast ballots in the elections would be about the same as during the local elections in November last year.
Photo: Lo Pei-de, Taipei Times
The 5,000 personnel unable to vote are mostly on active duty on warships on scheduled patrols, special forces detachments deployed in mountainous areas and on outlying “frontline” islands, and technical units operating Taiwan’s radar installations, the ministry said.
The number is also similar to the amount of personnel who could not vote in the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections, and constitutes less than 3 percent of Taiwan’s troops, ministry data showed.
The number of military personnel required to remain on active duty on the day of a presidential election has dropped from about 57,000 in the 2004 presidential election, to 10,500 in 2008 and 13,000 in 2012, the data showed.
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