Thread by @kharisborloff

It’s election eve in Taiwan! 18.8 million voters are eligible to go to the polls tomorrow to decide Taiwan’s next president and legislature.

Tweet storm follows about Election Day procedures in #taiwanelection

As in every #Taiwanelection, the election is held on a Saturday, and polls will be open from 8-4pm.

Polling places are typically public buildings: schools, community centers, etc., w/in easy walking distance.

There is usually one polling station for every 1500-3000 voters.

Voter rolls are finalized a couple months ahead of the election, and drawn from household registration manifests.

So everyone has to return to vote in the precinct where their household is registered, even if it’s not where they live.

More on why this can be a problem here:

ketagalanmedia.com/2020/01/06/tai…

So why doesn’t Taiwan have absentee voting? For a couple reasons.

1. Since ballots are counted directly at polling stations (more on that later), it would require getting them to the right place in time for the count. Or delaying the final results.

2. Concern about fraud. Ballot stuffing was a problem as late as the 1970s. Vote-buying is still a problem. Both would be harder to deter with absentee votes.

3. The big one: overseas voters. Taiwan has a large diaspora in the PRC, and in the US.

Imagine the skepticism if several hundred thousand overseas ballots from mainland China changed the outcome of a few races. Hard to trust all those votes were cast freely.

So, another option is early voting. Given Taiwan’s current setup, this seems easier to implement: same polling stations, same vote counting process, no delay to results. Just need to secure ballots until the count.

Granted, it doesn’t deal with the overseas vote issue.

On Election Day, voters walk into the polling station, check in w/ their national ID card, and receive 3 ballots, colored by type of election:

1. Presidential ballot—pink
2. District legislator—yellow/green/blue
3. Party ballot—white

Each is cast in a different box.

For the LY district races, voters will receive one of 3 types of ballot: yellow for the regular constituency, blue for highland indigenous, & green for lowland indigenous.

The different colors help workers give voters the right ballots, and facilitate speedy counting.

Taiwan’s elections are managed by the Central Election Commission, an independent commission appointed by the president and subject to LY confirmation.

The CEC was founded in 1980 (under martial law!) to standardize electoral practices and increase trust in election results.

The CEC works with county/city level election commissions to handle all aspects of the election process: finalizing voter rolls, registration of candidates, ballot design and distribution, volunteer recruitment & training, poll station setup, etc.

The same ballot design and poll place rules apply everywhere. (For Americans, this may seem strange.)

These include:

The ballot, which has not only named but a picture of candidates/parties, a number (assigned for each race by drawing lots), and a place to stamp your vote.

The polling booth, which has a thin curtain, and a stamp to cast your ballot.

The stamp has to be used to record your vote. If it’s outside the lines, or non-standard, or you write on the ballot, it’s counted as spoiled.

CEC has provided some helpful examples of this:

Polling booths are also standardized, and look like this:

Poll workers are volunteers, many of them schoolteachers. (It helps to have experience directing people and getting them to follow the rules!)

Typically they have done this many times, as have voters. Changes to procedures from election to election are marginal.

The CEC imposes a lot of restrictions in polling places, most because of rampant problems with electoral integrity in the 50s~80s, e.g. ballot stuffing, intimidation, and vote-buying.

Today, only vote-buying is still a serious potential threat.

To make it harder to sell your vote, you cannot bring cell phones into the polling station (it’d be easy to snap a picture of your ballot, to confirm you voted the way you promised.)

To ensure neutrality, no campaign material can be w/in 30 meters of a polling station.

Also to discourage vote-buying, voters cannot wear anything associated with a campaign or candidate into the polling place. So no Iron Han or Ying2020 jackets!

Other unusual rules:

To prevent release of misleading polls that might discourage or encourage supporters, the CEC imposes a polling blackout for the 10 days prior to each election.

So nobody has released a poll since Jan 1 (though campaigns can still do internal polls).

As part of the sacrosanct polling blackout, the CEC also forbids exit polls. So unlike the last UK election, there will be no exit polls released to preview the results.

This also makes it harder to estimate voting patterns by group (age, partisanship, issue salience, etc).

But, Taiwan vote counting and reporting is really fast, so the exit polls wouldn’t be that valuable for forecasting the outcome even if they could be conducted.

We’ll probably know the final results by 9pm, five hours after the polls close. And most counts will be in by 6!

How is the vote reported so quickly? It’s counted by the same workers, right after the polls close, in view of anyone who wants to watch.

This public counting is one of the most powerful parts of Taiwan democracy. Everyone who visits Taiwan should see it at least once.

At 4pm, the polls close. Anyone still in line is allowed to vote. Once all votes are cast, the ballot boxes are immediately sealed and moved to the center of the room. Like this:

There are two types of seals over the ballot box: 1st placed before voting begins, after workers confirm that the boxes are empty. This pre-voting ballot stuffing. (E.g. below)

2nd placed over the closed box after voting has concluded. This prevents ballot stuffing afterwards.

How about security? There is a police officer in each polling precinct, there to back up poll workers’ directions and enforce the rules.

Usually nothing ever happens and they’re really bored.

You might think a police presence could be intimidating.

Actually, this is a good thing! In Taiwan, police have the highest levels of public trust of any government agency, far above political parties, the courts, and even the CEC.

Police are widely perceived as non-partisan.

This guy had to work the Huang Kuo-Yu recall vote in 2017.

He was happy to talk to me when I showed up:

If you’re interested in this topic, @jamestwotree reminds me that Jeffrey Martin has a great new book on police in Taiwan, and why they’re so well-respected.

cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/978150174…

@jamestwotree Anyway, back to ballot counting. Once the polls close, workers strong a line or barrier across the room, and set up chairs for observers: reporters, campaign staffers, members of the community, and anyone else who wants to watch.

@jamestwotree Observers can now photograph the counting process. If my memory is correct, this was allowed only beginning in 2016.

So as you watch, feel free to take pictures and video!

Like this:

@jamestwotree This is from the 2016 general election, at a polling station in the indigenous district of Wulai 烏來區.

Note:
- votes called out one by one, with a worker assigned to record each vote on a piece of paper pasted to the wall
- counting for each race takes place simultaneously

@jamestwotree - ballots saved in a pile after being counted. This is in case of a recount.
- votes tallied for each candidate on sheets on the wall.
- the worker makes the character 正, which has five strokes. So each “Zheng” represents five votes. 10 正/sheet = 50 votes.

@jamestwotree Once all the votes are counted and recorded, the workers show the empty ballot box to observers, to confirm none have been left uncounted.

@jamestwotree Then the sheets are tallied up and the results posted outside the polling station.

Here are the results of the Huang recall vote in 2016 (Huang survived because turnout wasn’t high enough).

@jamestwotree All this, of course, is transparent and open to the public. Taiwan citizens get to be their own vote monitors.

As a result, it’s virtually impossible to hack the vote count. Even mistakes get called out. Typically, the error rate is <1% and yet the results are known w/in 2 hrs.

@jamestwotree * 2017, not 2016