Fraters Libertas

Chinese Democracy

Apparently the presidential election results in Taiwan are causing a bit of a controversy. It’s mostly based on the closeness of the outcome. Out of more than 13 million votes cast, the difference was only 30,000 votes. In addition, nearly 340,000 votes were declared invalid by election officials. A recount is being demanded by the losing side, and just today the government agreed to it, in some form.

I normally wouldn’t expect a lot to come from this. Historically speaking (in the US). barring fraud, recounts usually increase the vote margin for the presumptive victor. Reason being, lost, missing and invalidated ballots (as a whole) take on the characteristics of a random sample of the population - thus proving incompetence is evenly distributed across political affiliations. If the recounted ballots are distributed across the entire electoral base, then even a .9% differential in the initial count can result in a couple thousand more vote increase in the margin for the original leader. A fact the Gore-Lieberman (aka Sore-Loserman) campaign was no doubt aware of when they were suing in court to only recount a handful of counties in Florida, counties in which they knew they were the leaders.

I don’t know diddly about Taiwanese electoral procedures. But I’m willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt on the fraud allegations. The country has decades of experience with administering elections. In terms of respect for the rule of law, they’re almost to First World standards. They have a relatively free press and an active, engaged (and now enraged) political opposition, so it shouldn’t be possible to pull off a blatant fraud. Plus, their current leader is a staunch anti-Communist, so deep in your heart, you know he’s right.

However, the issue of the alleged assassination attempt on President Chen a few days before the election does give one pause. No one was seriously injured, despite initial, elective eve reports to the contrary. No suspects have been identified and several incongruities exist in Chen's treatment and in the investigation of the incident. The opposition is crying foul - saying it was all nothing more than a staged sympathy ploy.

Normally, I’d dismiss this accusation as screwball reverse Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorizing (and wonder if Jesse Ventura has started teaching a course on this at Harvard yet). But then I read this historical nugget, about President Chen’s dramatic past. From the NY Times:

...Mr. Chen, running for office in Tainan 18 years ago, appeared at an election-eve rally with an intravenous drip and claiming that he had been poisoned by the Nationalists, then the governing party. He appeared healthy the next day

Interesting. Well, if this whole election thing doesn’t work out for Chen after all, at least he can fall back on a career in professional wrestling promotions.