Friday, December 2, 2016

Taiwan: Legislature passes amendment loweringsignatures and turnout requirement for recalls; allowing campaigning during recall effort

Under the old law, a recall needed turnout of half the voters (and half of those had to vote to remove) for it to pass. The turnout requirement has now dipped to 1/4 of the voters. Signature gathering is much easier, it went from 2% of the total electorate to 1 % for the first stage of the recall, and the follow-up petition now needs 10% as opposed to 13%. The time grame has been doubled from 30 to 60 days.

Campaigning is now allowed in recall efforts as well.
The bill follows the 2014 "Appendectomy Project", which was launched by activists with the intention of recalling Kuomintang lawmakers activists claimed were unfit to serve, including Tsai Cheng-yuan, Lin Hung-chih and Wu Yu-Sheng.
Out of the three cases, only the motion to recall Tsai garnered the requisite number of signatures, but it did not attract required voter turnout numbers.
The Taipei City Election Commission fined the team that launched the project NT$600,000 in March of this year on the grounds that they breached the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act by campaigning for Tsai's recall after the motion had received enough signatures.

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