A chaotic day of referendum voting demands changes to a system that few people managed to grasp.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/11/25
By: Cat Thomas

Yesterday, I spent the day bobbing around a few polling stations in Taipei city. I spoke to around 30 exiting voters at various locations, a number of election officials and specially assigned police officers. I wasn’t taking notes or keeping count. I identified myself as a journalist, but feared that recording or noting responses would squander the goodwill of people who were prepared to open up to me.

Initially, I wanted to get a sense of how people were voting in the referendums, but it quickly became clear that this ad-hoc field research was uncovering deeper structural issues and flaws in the voting process. I spoke to friends outside the capital about their experience of going to the polls, and found that their experiences echoed my observations in Taipei.

The electorate in Taiwan voted on 10 referendum questions. This is the first time Taiwan has run so many referendum questions concurrently, due to changes to the Referendum Act which took effect in December 2017. Outside the polling stations I visited in Taipei, many people complained that the referendum questions had not only increased the time it took to vote, with waits of two hours being par for the course in Taipei, especially in the afternoon, but also that the process of completing the referendum ballots was confusing.

The questions fell into three categories: Five questions on same-sex marriage and education (some of which were conflicting), three on the government’s green energy policy (one of which takes immediate effect), one on maintaining current restrictions on food imports from areas of Japan affected by the nuclear disaster of 2011, and one on applying to the Olympic committee to use the name Taiwan, rather than Chinese Taipei, for the Olympic team.    [FULL  STORY]