My girlfriend is paying $700 and taking the long train trip to Tainan just to vote in the election. She’s only 23… just graduated college.
Who is she voting for?
Twenty-three million people, including 225 Legislators, and no one can figure out how to institute a system for absentee ballots . . . . . now that is intelligence, I tell you!!!
[quote=“tigerman”]Who is she voting for?[/quote]You think he’s going to tell the DPP people of Tainan that there’s a KMT supporter on her way ?
Cheaper than a divorce I guess.
There is a political reason behind Taiwan’s failure to set up an absentee ballot system. The KMT has long used overseas Chinese to counter and overwhelm the local Taiwanese population. Just check how many overseas Chinese were naturalized in Taiwan in the 70s and 80s. It was in the hundreds of thousands. Why else do you think the KMT would want to crowd more people into this already crowded island?
The DPP has also tried to build support bases overseas, but the KMT has been doing this since the beginning of the last century. Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Qing dynasty was to a large extent funded by overseas Chinese. An absentee system would easily give the KMT a huge extra handle by which to whip its enemies.
You see, the whole thing is complicated by “one China.” The KMT, with its one China policy, could even issue ID cards to the entire 1.3 billion mainland population, send out ballots to them and use them to smother the Taiwanese electorate, at least in theory. I believe Beijing would happily cooperate.
Eldridge Cleaver and The Peace and Freedom Party! 
yes but…an absentee system within taiwan surely makes sense; especially for a presidential election where it doesn’t matter if you don’t vote in your own neighbourhood…buggered if i’d fight the traffic to kaohsiung and back just to have my say; better idea would be to find a kmt supporter also planning to travel back to vote and agree to cancel each other out (a cunning plan methinks)
With a little bit of lobbying, you can easily stretch a domestic absentee system to overseas. That’s why it’s such a sensitive matter. Think about how the pan-blues will clamor for absentee balloting for Taiwanese business people in China.
Eldridge Cleaver and The Peace and Freedom Party!
[/quote]
He really would have to be born again – and not just the figurative kind he went through in the late 1970s – for that to work, Cleaver having been dead for several years. But if Missouri can elect a dead man, I suppose it could be possible anywhere. (Aside: Do Lien and Soong belong to the undead? Just wondering.)
I interviewed Cleaver about 20 years ago, back when he was espousing the virtues of Reagan and had taken to wearing an American flag lapel pin. :america: There’s nothing like living in a communist country to make one re-evaluate communism’s virtues. I wonder whatever happened to that tape.
Can’t really blame them. In the U.S., absentee ballots are a major source of vote-selling and fraud. Unlike a polling booth, it makes it easy to verify that the people the unions are paying $20 (or a pack of cigarettes, in the case of the drunks and psychiatric patients in Wisconsin) to vote Democratic really are marking the circle for Al Gore.
A former coworker remarked that he and his wife always vote absentee – he fills out her ballot so that she votes “correctly”.
And think about how the Commie officials in China will teach the Taiwanese business people to vote correctly. A pretty chilling prospect indeed.
“After Lien and Soong claim victory at 7:31 pm on Saturday night, riots will break out in Taipei and Gaoshiung, that will last two days. PLA soldiers from China will come over to restore order for five days and then go back home.”
I heard this on the radio today. Call-in show. Believe it?
This might be the end of Taiwan as we know (knew) it, the caller, who was Taiwanese said.
[quote]the caller, who was Taiwanese said.
[/quote]
I don’t believe he was Taiwanese. I believe he comes from the same planet you do.
[quote=“sandman”][quote]the caller, who was Taiwanese said.
[/quote]
I don’t believe he was Taiwanese. I believe he comes from the same planet you do.[/quote]
Definitely Galactians from the planet Conspiratoid, here to institute a program of compulsory anal probes.
On a related note, I recently read something about a group of some 800 American Taiwanese living in Brooklyn, NY organizing charter flights back to the island in time to cast their ballots. Now that’s dedication!
CK
A good friend of mine is heading south as well…however, I have been told, by an earthling of Taiwanisian persuasion, that she could have her residency switched to Tpe if she wanted. Granted, she prbly has other reasons for keeping her addydown there, but…if voting is the only “perk”, then I wouldn’t be so “proud” of her, but rather that the whole thing was rather dump(sic).
Not gonna tell you who she’s voting for, not that it’s even gonna matter. It’s a new world come Sat. night.
DOK world! Dictatorial Old KMTworld!