News
All 4 referendum proposals fail
By ECCT staff writers
All four of the referendum questions put to Taiwanese voters on 18 December failed to achieve the minimum 25% of votes in favour to pass, mainly due to low voter turnout of 41.09%, including the invalid votes.
The four questions voted on included whether the long-mothballed Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei should be unsealed for commercial operations and whether a ban on the import of pork containing traces of the controversial feed additive ractopamine should be reinstated. The other two issues involved the fate of a liquefied natural gas terminal being built near an algal reef in Taoyuan and whether future referendums should be held concurrently with national elections.
The number of people who supported each of the four referendum initiatives were outnumbered by those who opposed them by margins ranging from 2.08 to 5.68 percentage points, according to Central Election Commission (CEC) data.
The votes cast in opposition to each of the questions were 4,163,464 (conservation of algal reefs), 4,120,038 (referendums), 4,131,203 (pork imports), and 4,262,451 (nuclear power), surprising close given a fairly wide disparity in opposition to the different issues in opinion polls.
The results in the north and south of Taiwan were clearly divided across political lines.
Data from the Central Election Commission shows most voters in the north sided with the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and voted "yes" to all four questions, while a majority of voters in the south backed the DPP and cast "no" votes.
Figures show most of the "yes" votes were cast in Taipei, Keelung, and Taoyuan while most of the "no" votes were cast in Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung.63% of the votes cast by Tainan residents were "no" votes, the highest rate of any city or county.
