Petition to recall Kaohsiung mayor passes second stage

By Ko Yu-hao and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer and CNA





The second phase of a petition to recall Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) has passed the signature threshold required to initiate a recall vote, the Kaohsiung City Election Commission said yesterday.

Citizen Mowing Action, which organized the petition with We Care Kaohsiung and other groups, on March 9 submitted 406,880 signatures to the commission for the second stage.

Kaohsiung Deputy Mayor Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), the commission’s head, said the commission had mobilized nearly 600 civil servants over 29 days to review the signed petition copies.

The review process eliminated 29,218 copies, Chen said, adding that about 10,000 were from people who provided signatures in the first stage of the petition.

Another 13,000 were eliminated due to incorrect information about the signers’ residency, and another 2,000 were suspected to be forged, chen said.

However, the number of valid copies — 377,662 — still exceeded the 228,134 signatures required to launch a recall vote, he said.

A recall vote could be held on June 6 or 13, but the Central Election Commission (CEC) would make the final decision after receiving the city commission’s results today, Chen said.

According to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), the first step in the recall process is raising a proposal containing the signatures of at least 1 percent of a constituency’s eligible voters, which in the case of Kaohsiung was 22,800 signatures.

The CEC on Jan. 17 said that the petition had passed the first stage with 28,560 valid signatures.

In the second phase, the initiators of the petition — which was submitted one year after Han’s inauguration on Dec. 25, 2018 — had 60 days to collect signatures from at least 10 percent of the city’s eligible voters, or about 230,000, but not the same ones who signed in the first stage.

In a recall vote, a simple majority must vote in favor of recalling an official for the vote to succeed, with at least 25 percent of eligible voters participating, or about 570,000 people in this case, the CEC said.