CEC to investigate Nantou committee's petition rejections

Taipei, May 28 (CNA) The Nantou County election committee said Tuesday night it acted properly in rejecting recall petitions after the Central Election Commission (CEC) said it would launch an administrative probe into whether the committee's actions were legal.

The CEC, which announced the probe after doubts were cast on the committee's actions by ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians, said local election committees fall under its oversight, and it is its duty to monitor how election matters are handled.

It also called on the Nantou election committee, which insisted it followed proper procedures, and local household registration offices to cooperate with the investigation.

The probe was in response to questions raised over the election committee's rejection of petition papers seeking to recall the two legislators representing the county at the national level -- Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and Yu Hao (游顥) of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT).

At a press conference Tuesday, members of a group seeking to recall Ma said they had reviewed the rejected petitions and thought them to be in compliance with relevant regulations.

The group accused the election committee of rejecting the petitions for vague reasons such as signatures being "scrawled," which made resubmitting the signed petitions difficult.

At a separate press conference, members of a group acting to recall Yu echoed the message, saying the committee lacked consistency and transparency in its handling of the petitions.

The DPP, which has backed efforts to recall as many opposition legislators as possible and give it a chance to regain majority control of the Legislative Yuan, also argued that the committee's actions were not lawful.

DPP lawmaker Puma Shen (沈伯洋) said the committee admitted to rejecting petitions because of scrawled signatures and unmatched handwriting with data from household registration agencies.

A scrawled signature is not a valid reason to reject a petition, while using signature data from household registration agencies is an illegal breach of personal data, Shen alleged.

Nantou County Councilor Shen Su-cheng (沈夙崢) of the DPP echoed the DPP lawmaker's accusations on using signature data from household registration agencies.

She also said she asked the CEC during the signature collection campaign if the signatures had to be written neatly, and the CEC responded that they did not.

In a statement Tuesday evening responding to the allegations, the Nantou election committee said it rejected the signatures because there was "incorrect or unclear writing," as required by law, not because the signatures were "scrawled."

It also said it referred to household registration data to check registered names, not signatures.

Of the 3,817 signatures rejected in one of the recall cases, 2,385 of them were rejected because they were submitted for both the first and second stages of the recall initiation process, which is against the law, the committee said.

Another 571 were deleted for errors in the name or signature columns, the committee said, adding that it did not find evidence of forgery.

Recall campaigns are required to gain signatures from local constituents in two different stages for a recall vote to be held.

The first stage requires the signatures from 1 percent of eligible voters in an electoral district and the second stage requires the signatures of 10 percent of such voters to be valid.

The signatures are received and checked by election commissions to ensure they meet the requirements for validity.

In the recent wave of recall campaigns, the CEC and prosecutors have led high-profile raids and probes into the KMT for suspected forging of signatures by groups looking to recall DPP politicians.

(By Hsiao Po-yang, Kao Hua-chien and Wu Kuan-hsien)

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