FEATURE/Taiwan may be a tech hub, but use of paper ballots steeped in history

By Alison Hsiao, CNA staff reporter

Manually casting and counting paper ballots may seem out of tune in a high-tech hub, but that is how Taiwan has always handled its elections, including in 2024, when Taiwanese cast 42 million votes for presidential and legislative candidates.

Polling stations in Taiwan do not use electronic machines for casting and tabulating votes. Everything is done manually and in person, whether poll workers checking IDs, handing out paper ballots, sealing ballot boxes, or reading and counting each ballot in public, or voters marking and casting ballots.

It is a practice that goes back nearly 90 years, dating back to the Japanese colonial period in 1935.

"The first local election was held in 1935 but limited to those who paid a certain amount in taxes and were qualified to vote," said Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮), a professor of history at National Taiwan University, in an email reply to CNA.

"The voting method then was writing the intended candidate's name on the ballot, but the counting was even then done by reading out the names on the ballots for tallying, according to historical records," she said.

Starting in 1950, after the KMT regime retreated to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War, municipal and county-level elections with universal suffrage were held under U.S. pressure, the professor said.

"Although the voting was changed to using a stamp for the desired candidate due to the low literacy rate, the tallying method of reading out the cast ballots one by one remained," Chen said.

"The KMT government used the ballot-reading and counting process as political propaganda to uphold the image of a democratic 'Free China,'" she said.

There still exists video footage of election processes from as early as 1960 during the martial law period, when the freedom of speech was suppressed, that was apparently for promotional use.

An exhibition on the history of Taiwan's elections at Academia Historica in Taipei, that will run at least to the end of this year, is currently showcasing various election materials from different historical periods, including those during the martial law era that lasted until 1987.

A video clip showing candidate registration, ballot casting, and vote tallying from different elections in different years during the martial law period was on display.

Video of the ballot counting process in the 1977 local elections, for instance, showed people at the polling station watching over the counting of votes.

Whether the monitoring was impartial, however, was a major question mark as rivals of KMT opponents were not allowed to send their own observers, according to Chen.

Fraud was often a common feature of the counting process, "from the staff having ink on their fingers to smear ballots into invalid ballots, and reading the name of the KMT candidate even when it was a vote for an opponent, to pouring ballots into the KMT's ballot box during 'a sudden blackout,'" the professor said.

The Chungli (or Zhongli) Incident in 1977 represented a major eruption of the people's pent-up anger against election-rigging.

It was "the first popular protest against election fraud, paving the way for future street protests in Taiwan," the exhibition said as part of a virtual reality tour taking visitors to the demonstrations and clashes during the incident and to the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident.

That is why Soochow University political science professor Hwang Shiow-duan (黃秀端) said it all comes down to trust issues.

The transparency of publicly reading out the votes, or "singing ballots" as the Chinese word "Chang Piao" [唱票] literally means, is aimed at gaining public trust.

"Taiwan definitely has the ability [to make voting machines] and conduct electronic voting," but the political history of Taiwan has sowed distrust between political parties, Hwang said, adding that there is also the worry that China might interfere in the process.

If Taiwan's elections were to go electronic or online, even mere rumors that the machines or online system got hacked could destroy the trust mechanism in the country and the government's legitimacy, she said.

The scholar also indicated that disinformation spread about ballots being tampered could also erode trust.

"Even with the open process of 'singing' and counting ballots monitored by observers from each political party, there are still rumors about ballots being tampered with from the ballot printing stage to choosing ink that some claimed could vanish on ballots," Hwang said.

Some of those claims were spread during Taiwan's election, and five of the Central Election Commission's nine press releases in January leading up to Election Day were released to address those rumors.

The task of conducting elections has to be trusted by the public for elections to confer legitimacy, she said.

"The reason why our elections can keep on going despite chaos-instigating disinformation is precisely because of the trust mechanism, the fact that people can literally see the votes," Hwang said.

(The election history exhibition of Academia Historica is also online: https://exhibition.drnh.gov.tw/front/en/lobby/theme)