The recalls: what happened?

Voting for the 24 recalls was held Saturday, and they resulted in an unambiguous victory for the KMT. None of the 24 KMT legislators lost their seat. Only one of the recalls was even close. After a year in which the KMT bungled its response to the recall efforts again and again, it produced a shockingly triumphant result in the final and decisive juncture.

If you dig deeper into the outcomes, there are some more nuanced aspects to the results. I will discuss a few of those later in this post, but the biggest and most basic takeaway is that the KMT had a very good day and the recall campaigns failed utterly to achieve their goal of recalling any KMT legislators.

What caused this result? Pundits from all sides are busy spinning the outcome to tell you what it all means. In the aftermath of every election, you will hear a pundit passionately insist that, if they had only done what he proposed, the results would have been very different or that, precisely they because they did do what he favored, they got a successful outcome. And going forward, the only way they get a better result or continue to get good results is to pursue the strategy that he prefers.

I’m going to give you a far less satisfying answer. I don’t think there is one clear factor drove this outcome. Society is diverse, and different things mattered to different people. There are probably 20 different explanations, and, to some degree, they are all right. We don’t have any exit polls or other good objective evidence about what drove voting behavior; everyone is merely speculating. Some of the speculation is more reasonable than others, but no one has a definitive answer.

So let’s look at several of the proposed explanations, trying to remind ourselves that each one is probably somewhat right and somewhat incomplete.

• This was not surprising. These were all blue districts that elected KMT legislators, and they continued to be blue districts that supported their KMT legislators.
• This was not surprising. The KMT and TPP won 57% of the party list vote in 2024. They represent mainstream public opinion.
• Voters saw the recalls as a cynical DPP power play to overturn the 2024 election, and they rejected it.
• Voters did not want to give the DPP unified control of government. They would prefer the legislature to act as a check on DPP power and to effectively oversee the executive branch. They also worry about DPP dictatorial tendencies.
• Voters don’t want to vote every year. They voted in 2024, and they didn’t want encourage recalls and perpetual election campaigning. They just want things to return to the normal, non-election environment.
• This was an abuse of the recall provision. Recall should be done on a case by case basis rather than against an entire party, and perhaps only against legislators accused of corruption or other crimes.
• Voters are sick of hearing about Chinese infiltration. KMT sympathizers, in particular, are sick of being accused being willing or unwitting lackeys of the CCP.
• This was a vote of no confidence in President Lai.
• Lai and the DPP didn’t get fully involved, leaving too much of the heavy lifting to the recall groups rather than fully mobilizing all their party resources
• Voters were enticed by the prospect of a NT10,000 universal stipend
• Voters were repelled by the DPP’s rejection of the death penalty for child abusers.
• Voters are used to seeing majorities in the legislature ram their legislation through. The KMT/TPP hardball tactics to pass the legislative reform bill, the budget cuts, the Constitutional Court reform, and so on were not seen as fundamental violations democratic processes.
• The balance of between the executive, legislature, and Constitutional Court Is too abstract for ordinary voters to care about.
• Voters were not bothered by the budget cuts, and they were happy with reallocation of money from the central government to local governments.
• Ko Wen-je has been detained for nearly a year while prosecutors investigate a corruption case. This duration is seen as unfairly long and motivated by political pressure from the DPP. It has also cemented the alliance between the KMT and TPP, giving TPP voters a reason to come out to vote against the recall.
• The KMT legislators were strongly supported popular mayors, and this was a show of support Chiang, Hou, Chang, and Lu.
• I’m sure I’m overlooking half a dozen more arguments.

The narrative that’s starting to slowly gel in my head goes something like this. Late last year, the recall groups were organizing credible campaigns against several of the most controversial legislators. At that point, it was possible to argue that these particular legislators had violated fundamental democratic norms and needed to be replaced without necessarily arguing that the entire KMT/TPP coalition needed to be replaced. However, simply replacing 4 or 5 controversial KMT legislators with a different set of KMT legislators would not have solved the DPP’s problem of being a minority inside the legislature. For that, they needed to flip some seats, and that required attacking legislators in marginal seats rather than the most controversial legislators. However, once the DPP announced a universal recall campaign, the underlying logic shifted to a more fundamentally partisan clash. In a nutshell, it became very difficult to argue that KMT sympathizers should recall someone controversial like Wang Hung-wei and not worry about the partisan implications because they could replace her with another KMT legislator while simultaneously arguing that they were trying recall KMT legislators everywhere in order to change the balance of power in the legislature. The result of weakening this argument against controversial legislators was that the only viable path to success was a significant shift in public opinion away from the KMT and toward the DPP. In January and February, when the die was cast, a shift in public opinion didn’t seem too far-fetched. Polling showed that support for Lai and the DPP was holding up fairly well and the numbers for the KMT and TPP were lower than in January 2024. Critically, if this was turning into a partisan fight, the DPP needed to go all out. They needed to send out all their big guns, including the president, premier, mayors, all major party figures, and all legislators to all the marginal districts in an effort to change a few minds in those critical districts to transform them from light blue to light green districts. Instead, the big guns mostly stayed in the background, leaving the spotlight to the recall groups. In the end, the recall results did not show any evidence of a significant shift in public opinion. The results in July 2025 look a lot like the results in January 2024.

Of course, this is the narrative that I’m developing with the benefit of hindsight. None of this seemed obvious in the moment. Oh, and most of those other factors that I listed above also had an impact.

Whatever the reason, the indisputable fact is that the KMT turned out more people than the recall movements. One way to illustrate just how thorough the KMT victory was is to think about the 25% threshold. The No vote exceeded the 25% threshold in all 24 districts, while the yes vote only exceeded that threshold in seven cases. That is, even if no KMT supporters had turned out, only 7 legislators would have been recalled. The yes side simply did not turn out enough voters to achieve its goals. Meanwhile, the no side turned out more than enough. From this perspective, the outcome was both a KMT success and a recall failure.

One of the premises of recalls is that voters delegate political power to politicians in general elections to act on their behalf, and, if they are dissatisfied with the performance of those politicians, they can withdraw that delegation through a recall. This suggests that a recall should either show some evidence of voters changing their minds or of a decisive shift in passion and energy (or both). Some people who originally supported the politician should now regret that decision, or a large number of voters who could not be bothered to turn out in the previous election must be mobilized (or previous voters must become apathetic). We did not see any systematic evidence of this kind of shift in public opinion in these recall results. In general, voters reaffirmed the choices they made in 2024.

The first and second stages of the recall process involved petition drives. In these stages, people who were dissatisfied with the legislator were mobilized to sign petitions. The overwhelming majority of these people were never supporters of the legislator. These petitions represented high levels of anger and disgust among the part of the electorate that opposed the legislator in the first place. In the 3^rd stage, the supporters had their chance to weigh in. It turns out, they did not feel the same way as all those people who signed petitions.

(We didn’t see any evidence of a shift in public opinion in the other direction either. There isn’t much reason to believe that people who voted for president Lai or DPP legislators regret those choices.)

If one judges the recall campaign by whether they were able to recall legislators – and that was their stated objective – these recalls were a total failure. However, perhaps we should take a broader view of this process. There are some ways in which these recalls impacted political behavior and might affect strategic calculations going forward.

I doubt any of the KMT legislators particularly enjoyed going through this recall experience. They all survived, but they had to fight to keep their seats. They had to spend a lot of time and energy – and probably a bit of money – to mobilize their supporters for a vote that none of them asked for. I’m quite sure that they would have preferred to spend the last few months doing something else with their time and energy. It’s possible that the lesson they and future legislators take away is that they don’t have to worry about recalls, but it’s also possible that the enduring lesson will be to try to avoid the stress of recalls by behaving in less controversial ways. Having to fight a recall is, in and of itself, a significant penalty.

There is a bit of anecdotal evidence that KMT legislators changed their behavior during the last six months as the gravity of the recall threat sunk in. There has been far less controversial news coming out of the legislature in the last few months than in 2024. The majority coalition has focused its efforts on more popular legislation such as the NT10,000 stipend or the bill dealing with child abuse and less blatantly partisan legislation seeking to alter the fundamental balance of power between the branches of government. We have heard stories about legislators spending more time going home to do constituency service. One vivid example of this is Lee Yen-hsiu’s decision to resign her position in the KMT leadership in order to spend more time in her constituency fighting the recall. Inside the legislature, there have also been stories about toned down rhetoric. Legislators who a year ago were yelling and screaming at government ministers have been much more polite and restrained in recent months.

The recalls have effectively changed the calculations involving the political calendar. In 2024, the next general elections were nearly three years away. The majority coalition seemed to believe it could act with impunity since voters would probably forget about things in 2024 by the time late 2026 or early 2028 rolled around. The recalls turned 2025 into an election year, and legislators had to adjust their behavior. One might think that, since the shackles are now off, they will go back to their previous behavior. However, it will not be long until the 2026 election season kicks off in earnest, so legislators might have to be might have to consider the effect of their behavior on that election. In other words, the recall campaign may have effectively cut a year out of the “normal” times in which legislators don’t worry too much about public opinion.

What about those controversial legislators? Earlier, I suggested that the argument against them had been weakened by the transformation from a few individual-based recalls to a broad-based partisan recall. Even so, there is evidence that these controversial legislators underperformed compared to other KMT legislators.

In this table, I look at the ratio of the percentage of no votes in the recall to the vote of Hou and Ko in the 2024 presidential election. (Since the results for Taitung and Hualien are skewed by large numbers of Indigenous voters, I use my numbers for non-indigenous voters derived from ecological inference estimates for those two counties.) This table is sorted from lowest to highest, so the people at the top of the table did the worst relative to previous partisan patterns.

In a previous post, I (subjectively) sorted legislators into various buckets. One of the buckets was controversial legislators. The eight controversial legislators are identified with an asterisk*. Earlier, I mentioned that the yes vote against seven legislators passed the 25% threshold. These seven legislators are identified with a hashtag#.

Legislator		Hou+Ko	“no” %	ratio
傅崐萁 *#	Fu Kun-chi	71.0	57.15	0.80
葉元之   #	Yeh Yuan-chih	59.5	51.37	0.86
徐巧芯 *#	Hsu Chiao-hsin	63.2	54.62	0.86
王鴻薇 *#	Wang Hung-wei	60.9	53.03	0.87
鄭正鈐   #	Cheng Cheng-chien	65.2	57.01	0.87
廖偉翔 *	Liao Wei-hsiang	63.4	55.97	0.88
牛煦庭	Niu Hsu-ting	62.4	55.15	0.88
羅廷瑋 *#	Lo Ting-wei	60.6	53.87	0.89
賴士葆	Lai Shi-pao	68.1	60.83	0.89
洪孟楷 *	Hung Meng-kai	62.9	56.19	0.89
羅智強 *	Lo Chih-chiang	63.6	56.87	0.89
李彥秀 *#	Lee Yen-hsiu	63.9	57.24	0.90
張智倫	Chang Chih-lun	65.5	58.68	0.90
黃健豪	Huang Chien-hao	64.0	57.35	0.90
林德福	Lin Teh-fu	68.4	61.96	0.91
萬美玲	Wan Mei-ling	63.1	57.32	0.91
廖先翔	Liao Hsien-hsiang	61.8	56.39	0.91
邱若華	Chiu Jo-hua	65.6	59.89	0.91
林沛祥	Lin Pei-hsiang	65.2	59.65	0.91
呂玉玲	Lu Yu-ling	67.7	62.09	0.92
魯明哲	Lu Ming-che	66.7	61.37	0.92
涂權吉	Tu Chuan-chi	63.4	59.06	0.93
黃建賓	Huang Chien-pin	66.0	62.29	0.94
丁學忠	Ting Hsueh-chung	55.4	57.37	1.04

All eight of the people I identified as controversial are found in the top half of this table, Fu Kun-chi, Hsu Chiao-hsin, and Wang Hung-wei, arguably three most controversial legislators, are in the top four. This suggests that were less successful at absorbing KMT and TPP support the Ian the less controversial KMT legislators facing recall. They all survived the recall, but, based on how everyone else did, it was probably closer than it should have been for these controversial legislators.

The Yes vote reached the 25% threshold against 5 of controversial legislators. For two of the other controversial legislators, Liao Wei-hsiang and Lo Chih-chiang, the yes vote was less than 1000 votes away from reaching the threshold. Most KMT legislators could have relied on low turnout to defeat the recall. If the controversial legislators had relied on low turnout, most of them would have lost their seat.

It might not be stark and vividly obvious to the casual observer, but the voters did not reward bad behavior in the legislature this time.

I want to make one final point about the recall process. In the runup to voting, I was asked several times whether the recall had polarized Taiwan’s society. I pushed back against this argument as strongly as I could. I do not believe the recalls fostered polarization and division.

In May 2024, events in the legislature were so extreme that many people felt the need to go out into the street to protest. Throughout the rest of the year, events in the legislature fueled these feelings of angst, anger, despair, fear, disgust, and betrayal. All that passion had to go somewhere. What did not happen is as important as what did. Taiwan did not experience widespread political violence, riots in the street, or police crackdowns to maintain order. The recalls funneled all that energy into legal process within the system. Volunteers spent countless hours learning the minutiae of the petition process, training themselves to talk to voters, sitting outside collecting signatures, checking petitions for errors, compiling them into the right format to submit to electoral commissions, and then working to convince voters to vote yes in the recall election. It all amounted to an enormous expenditure of time and energy. At the end of the process, people voted. The results did not come back the way the volunteers had hoped, but there was an objective result that the volunteers could not argue with. They didn’t fail because of some hidden conspiracy; they simply didn’t convince enough voters with their arguments. Democracy provided a constructive outlet to absorb and diffuse all that passion.

Is society completely unified today? Of course not. No society is. The point of democracy is that people have different values, goals, interests, and desires, but we can manage those differences through institutionalized mechanisms without resorting to violence. I think the recall campaigns were a successful example of this.

In lieu of writing…

Here is a podcast and a webinar that I’ve done recently.

It’s a challenge to get all gussied up for video when you are disabled, and you might notice that I’m wearing a blue T-shirt in both events rather than something more formal. I’ll leave it to you to speculate whether my blue T-shirts are subtle gestures of support for the KMT, the Bluebird movement, or just that I like the color blue.

Recall thresholds in each district

The Central Election Commission has announced the number of eligible voters in each district facing a recall as well as the 25% threshold needed for a recall to pass. Remember, the recall needs to satisfy two conditions. First, it must pass the 25% threshold for Yes votes. For example, The first row shows Taipei 3. In that district, at least 68,578 voters must vote to recall Wang Hung-wei. Second, there must be more yes votes than no votes. So even if there are 70,000 yes votes, Wang can defeat the recall by mobilizing 75,000 no votes.

So now when you watch the votes come in on Saturday evening, you will know what the thresholds are. Watch like a pro!

By the way, you can see the enormous disparity in the population of some of the districts. When the districts were drawn in 2007, all were within 15% of the city or county mean. They were supposed to be redistricted every ten years to keep the populations relatively equal. However, in 2017, the Central Election Commission and the legislature neglected to take up this responsibility and maintained the same districts wherever possible. So now, almost 20 years later, we do not have one person, one vote. New Taipei 1 has almost twice as many people as New Taipei 7, so people in New Taipei 1 only get about half a vote. It boggles my mind but those people aren’t screaming about this injustice. Hopefully, we will get a thorough redistricting in 2027 to rectify this egregious malapportionment.

Taipei	district	name	eligible	25%
	北3	王鴻薇	274,312	68,578
	北4	李彥秀	311,887	77,972
	北6	羅智強	228,981	57,246
	北7	徐巧芯	231,139	57,785
	北8	賴士葆	244,753	61,189
Hualien	花蓮	傅崐萁	191,367	47,842
New Taipei	新北1	洪孟楷	405,060	101,265
	新北7	葉元之	231,042	57,761
	新北8	張智倫	288,291	72,073
	新北9	林德福	237,380	59,345
	新北12	廖先翔	266,243	66,561
Taoyuan	桃1	牛煦庭	354,065	88,517
	桃2	涂權吉	316,423	79,106
	桃3	魯明哲	309,001	77,251
	桃4	萬美玲	306,688	76,672
	桃5	呂玉玲	282,711	70,678
	桃6	邱若華	285,041	71,261
Keelung	基隆	林沛祥	303,980	75,995
Hsinchu City	竹市	鄭正鈐 (立委)	357,063	89,266
	竹市	高虹安 (Mayor)	360,311	90,078
Taichung	中4	廖偉翔	337,718	84,430
	中5	黃健豪	374,348	93,587
	中6	羅廷瑋	277,436	69,359
Taitung	台東	黃建賓	113,385	28,347
Yunlin	雲1	丁學忠	271,663	67,916

More recall chatter (what else?)

I’ve been meaning to write about the polling results and the recalls, but I didn’t get around to it in time. Unfortunately, I had a major computer disaster and have spent the most of the last two weeks trying to fix my old computer and then buying and setting up an entirely new one. There were some interesting polling results about individual districts, but we are now in the polling blackout period so it is illegal for me to write about those. Sorry.

Five more recalls officially passed the second stage, so after the 24 recalls on July 26th there will be 7 more on August 23rd. However, not all recalls are equal. There is a reason that those 7 took longer to pass the second stage. Most of the recalls that are likely to pass will take place a week from today. (Remember when I was so confident several of the recalls wouldn’t pass second stage that I didn’t bother including them in my previous tables? Oops.)

A lot of the public focus during this campaign has been on a few districts with high profile legislators, especially Hualien (Fu Kun-chi), Taipei 3 (Wang Hung-wei), Taipei 6 (Lo Chih-chiang), and Taipei 7 (Hsu Chiao-hsin). Those districts are important since a successful recall or even a close call would send a strong message to all legislators about what is acceptable behavior in the legislature. However, if those districts are actually in play, we are probably looking at a historic result. We should probably pay more attention to the other districts.

I want to comment on a different race, New Taipei 1, that might have a different sort of impact. In 2024, Hung Meng-kai won this district by nearly 20%. It was a fantastic result for a district that historically has only been slightly favorable to the blue side. Of course, the population of this district is growing very fast — it is now the largest district in the entire country — so we don’t really know what the partisan balance is these days. Hung is now in his second term in the legislature and is very-well positioned to run for New Taipei mayor next year. We haven’t had a lot of chatter about the KMT nominee for New Taipei mayor, but I’m not impressed with the people that have been mooted so far. The most prominent is a deputy mayor Lee Szu-chuan, an old KNT War Horse Who has been appointed to several high positions but has never run for office. Apparently, they think they can repeat the model of Hou Yu-ih, who was deputy mayor before being elected mayor. However, he was a unique figure who had a national profile long before he became deputy mayor. Lee is basically a faceless party hack. The KMT would do much better to pick an elected representative. The KMT has six legislators in New Taipei, but two are old and radical and three are in their first terms. Hung is handsome, charismatic, not too inexperienced, and apparently fairly popular. To me, he is far and away the best choice. These advantages would be highlighted if he were to decisively defeat the recall campaign against him. On the other hand, if the recall were successful it would probably crush his hopes for the nomination.

A successful recall would wreck the careers of many of the incumbent legislators. For example , if any of the six legislators in Taoyuan were recalled, I wouldn’t expect to hear anything about them ever again. However, that is not true for everyone. A recall would be a significant bump in the road for someone like Hsu Chiao-hsin, but I wouldn’t expect it to end her career. She is young and charismatic enough that she could go back into the Taipei City Council and wait for another opportunity to move up. Similarly, Hung Meng-kai might still have a future, but this next year is a golden opportunity to become mayor and get on the ladder to the highest offices. That is to say, he is one of the legislators who has the most at stake in this recall campaign.

 (Regardless of who the KMT nominates, I think the person best positioned to win the New Taipei mayoral race next year is the DPP’s Su Chiao-hui.)

Next topic

In my previous post, I sorted the various districts into different buckets. One of the criteria was the partisan balance of each district. I thought I might do this in a more systematic way. The next two tables show each district’s result in the previous two presidential elections, sorted by the DPP’s vote share, going from most competitive to least competitive.

	Lai	Hou	Ko	legislator
Yunlin 1	44.6	29.4	26.0	丁學忠	Ting Hsueh-chung	1
New Taipei 7	40.5	33.5	26.0	葉元之	Yeh Yuan-chih	2
Taichung 6	39.4	32.2	28.4	羅廷瑋	Lo Ting-wei	3
Taipei 3	39.2	38.5	22.4	王鴻薇	Wang Hung-wei	4
Taipei 4	38.6	37.7	26.2	李彥秀	Lee Yen-hsiu	5
New Taipei 12	38.2	37.1	24.7	廖先翔	Liao Hsien-hsiang	6
Taichung 8	38.0	30.6	31.4	江啟臣	Chiang Chi-chen	7
Taichung 3	37.8	31.5	30.7	楊瓊櫻	Yang Chiung-ying	8
Taoyuan 1	37.6	31.6	30.8	牛煦庭	Niu Hsu-ting	9
Nantou 2	37.4	37.1	25.5	游顥	Yu Hao	10
New Taipei 1	37.1	36.0	26.9	洪孟楷	Hung Meng-kai	11
Taichung 2	37.1	32.0	30.9	顏寬恒	Yen Kuan-heng	12
Taoyuan 4	36.9	33.5	29.6	萬美玲	Wan Mei-ling	13
Taipei 7	36.8	40.0	23.2	徐巧芯	Hsu Chiao-hsin	14
Taoyuan 2	36.6	31.9	31.5	涂權吉	Tu Chuan-chi	15
Taichung 4	36.6	33.3	30.1	廖偉翔	Liao Wei-hsiang	16
Taipei 6	36.4	42.6	21.0	羅智強	Lo Chih-chiang	17
Taichung 5	36.0	34.2	29.8	黃健豪	Huang Chien-hao	18
Keelung	34.8	38.6	26.6	林沛祥	Lin Pei-hsiang	19
Hsinchu City	34.8	30.9	34.3	鄭正鈐	Cheng Cheng-chien	20
New Taipei 8	34.5	40.0	25.5	張智倫	Chang Chih-lun	21
Taoyuan 6	34.4	35.8	29.8	邱若華	Chiu Jo-hua	22
Nantou 1	34.4	38.9	26.7	馬文君	Ma Wen-chun	23
Taoyuan 3	33.4	35.8	30.9	魯明哲	Lu Ming-che	24
Taoyuan 5	32.3	36.6	31.1	呂玉玲	Lu Yu-ling	25
Taipei 8	31.9	43.5	24.6	賴士葆	Lai Shi-pao	26
New Taipei 11	31.7	44.9	23.4	羅明才	Lo Ming-tsai	27
New Taipei 9	31.6	44.8	23.6	林德福	Lin Teĥ-fu	28
Taitung	27.4	49.3	23.3	黃建賓	Huang Chien-pin	29
Hsinchu Cn 2	27.1	36.5	36.4	林思銘	Lin Szu-ming	30
Hualien	24.8	50.5	24.7	傅崐萁	Fu Kun-chi	31
National vote	40.1	33.5	26.5

		TSAI	HAN
1	Yunlin 1	61.4	34.6	丁學忠	Ting Hsueh-chung
2	New Taipei 7	58.9	36.4	葉元之	Yeh Yuan-chih
3	Taichung 3	58.4	36.6	楊瓊櫻	Yang Chiung-ying
4	Taoyuan 1	57.7	37.3	牛煦庭	Niu Hsu-ting
5	Taoyuan 2	57.6	37.6	涂權吉	Tu Chuan-chi
6	Taichung 2	57.5	37.1	顏寬恒	Yen Kuan-heng
7	Taichung 6	57.3	37.8	羅廷瑋	Lo Ting-wei
8	Taoyuan 4	56.3	38.9	萬美玲	Wan Mei-ling
9	Taichung 8	56.0	39.4	江啟臣	Chiang Chi-chen
10	New Taipei 1	55.5	39.8	洪孟楷	Hung Meng-kai
11	Taichung 4	55.4	39.5	廖偉翔	Liao Wei-hsiang
12	Hsinchu City	55.3	39.3	鄭正鈐	Cheng Cheng-chien
13	New Taipei 12	54.2	41.4	廖先翔	Liao Hsien-hsiang
14	Taichung 5	54.2	40.9	黃健豪	Huang Chien-hao
15	Taipei 4	53.6	41.8	李彥秀	Lee Yen-hsiu
16	Taipei 3	53.4	42.2	王鴻薇	Wang Hung-wei
17	Taoyuan 6	53.0	42.5	邱若華	Chiu Jo-hua
18	Taoyuan 3	52.4	42.8	魯明哲	Lu Ming-che
19	Nantou 2	52.1	43.5	游顥	Yu Hao
20	Taipei 7	51.6	44.1	徐巧芯	Hsu Chiao-hsin
21	Taoyuan 5	51.3	43.9	呂玉玲	Lu Yu-ling
22	New Taipei 8	51.0	44.5	張智倫	Chang Chih-lun
23	Keelung	50.8	43.9	林沛祥	Lin Pei-hsiang
24	Nantou 1	49.5	46.0	馬文君	Ma Wen-chun
25	Taipei 6	48.9	47.0	羅智強	Lo Chih-chiang
26	Taipei 8	47.0	48.6	賴士葆	Lai Shi-pao
27	Hsinchu Cn 2	46.7	47.4	林思銘	Lin Szu-ming
28	New Taipei 11	45.5	50.3	羅明才	Lo Ming-tsai
29	New Taipei 9	45.4	50.0	林德福	Lin Teĥ-fu
30	Taitung	38.1	58.3	黃建賓	Huang Chien-pin
31	Hualien	35.9	60.4	傅崐萁	Fu Kun-chi
	National vote	57.1	38.6

The two tables reveal similar rankings, but there are some interesting differences. The only district in green territory is Yunlin 1. New Taipei 7 is roughly similar to the national balance overall. These are districts that the DPP needs to win if it has any hope controlling a majority in the legislature. All the other districts are some shade of blue.

If you (arbitrarily) consider any district within 3% of the national average as competitive, there are 12 competitive districts on the first list and 14 on the second list. 9 are on both lists. That’s quite a few light blue districts.

One of the interesting results was that Taipei 3 and Taipei 4 were very similar in both elections but they were much more competitive in 2024 (ranking 4^th and 5th) than in 2020 (15^th and 16th). In the legislative races, Taipei 4 has been very close the last few cycles while the DPP has never put up a serious challenge in Taipei 3. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. On the one hand, you might conclude that Wang Hung-wei is in serious trouble both because she is controversial and because her district is a lot closer than everybody thinks. On the other hand, you might think that they should both be safe unless they are so controversial that they have become toxic.

From years of observation, I think of Taoyuan 1 and 2 as very competitive or even green districts. However, the DPP did very badly in them in 2024.

The recalls in Taichung 3 and 8 are not until August 23, so I’ll save my commentary on those districts until later. For now, let’s just note how competitive those two districts look even though most observers think that those two legislators are among the safest of the KMT incumbents.

The figures for Taitung and Hualien are skewed a heavy population of Indigenous voters who don’t affect the district recalls. We don’t have official data on how the non-indigenous voters voted in the presidential elections, but my unofficial estimates are that Lai got about 34% in Taitung and 29% in Hualien. That makes the former solidly blue and the latter deep blue. These are not districts the KMT should be having trouble with.

Types of districts in this recall

Last week the central election Commission announced that 24 recalls will be held on July 26. That’s roughly 1/3 of the country, concentrated mostly in the north and in urban areas. Also, all the legislators facing recalls are KMT members who won in 2024, so this is almost all happening in places with more blue voters than green voters. We have never seen anything like this before, and it’s unlikely we’ll see it again. So what should we expect?

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know my standard answer is “we don’t know.” And just like in previous posts before voting day, I’m going to argue that this time is especially unpredictable.

In most elections, turnout is a major unknown variable. We don’t know whether turn out will be in the low 60s or above 70, we don’t know which groups will turn out (especially young voters), and we don’t know which side will turn out its voters more effectively. Those questions all apply this time as well, except even more so. Turn out for recalls has varied from under 50% with both sides trying to over 40% with only one side trying. The recall of Han Kuo-yu was probably equivalent to 65 or 70% if both sides had tried, or more or less equivalent to what you would see in a general election. This recall will have a lot of national publicity, so I expect turnout to be fairly high. However, there are reasons to wonder. The DPP and KMT bases can both be expected to turn out, but we can’t be quite so sure about everyone else. Ko Wen-je pulled a lot of people to the polls in 2024, and he isn’t on the ballot this time. A lot of those voters might just decide that this isn’t their fight and they can sit this one out.

Both the KMT and the DPP have tricky considerations around how overtly to mobilize. The KMT has decided to try to mobilize its base, which makes a certain amount of sense. The recall threshold is low enough that they need to fight back, and, remember, most of these districts are fairly blue-leaning. However, there are probably not enough hard-core KMT true believers in most districts, and they need to win some districts that are closer to toss ups. If they scream frantically about green communism and DPP dictatorship, it’ll probably turn away as many people as they attract. Their best message is a much calmer reminder to voters that they want something to balance and constrain DPP power. Individually, the best message is constituency service. If the KMT goes all out screeching and howling, those calmer messages might get drowned out. Let’s also remember that the KMT polling numbers are not great right now, so those wavering voters sympathizers are already quite shaky.

The DPP doesn’t want to step on its toes of all the volunteers who worked so hard on the signature drives. It also would like this to be as large a coalition as possible and that might include some blue voters who don’t approve of the content passed by the legislature or the process used to do it. If the DPP stays in the background, those people can tell themselves they are voting against a specific legislator without expressing approval for the DPP. However, the DPP needs to ensure that competent campaigns are being waged everywhere. It has to make sure that the recall campaigns have adequate financing and advertising. And it also needs to make sure that there are some consistent themes about how rotten the KMT is.

*There are still 7 districts where the recall has not been finalized. For the purposes of this post, I’m guessing that New Taipei 11 and the two Nantou district school will all pass, but the other four (Taichung 2,3,8 and Hsinchu 2) will fail at the second stage.

I’m trying to make sense of the recalls by putting the districts into several buckets. The first way to look at recalls is through the most traditional lens, the partisan balance. The first bucket includes districts where the balance between the blue and green sides is fairly even. Most of these are districts that the DPP won in 2016 and 2020 (when their presidential candidate was pulling them to victory with 56 or 57% of the vote).

葉元之	New Taipei 7
廖先翔	New Taipei 12
牛煦庭	Taoyuan 1
涂權吉	Taoyuan 2
羅廷瑋	Taichung 6
游 顥	Nantou 2
丁學忠	Yunlin 1
黃建賓	Taitung 1
鄭正鈐	Hsinchu City 1

You might argue about the inclusion of one or two of these, but that’s nine solid targets that are realistic possibilities not just for recall but also for winning the by-election. This is why I have not dismissed the possibility of the DPP taking power in the legislature after this is all over.

The second bucket also uses a partisan lens, including districts that lean more blue but in which the green side has an outside shot.

王鴻薇	Taipei 3
李彥秀	Taipei 4
洪孟楷	New Taipei 1
萬美玲	Taoyuan 4
廖偉翔	Taichung 4
林沛祥	Keelung 1

These districts strike me as unlikely to support the recall and even more unlikely to change hands in the by-election if a recall were to succeed. However, they are close enough to the KMT can’t take them for granted.

The third bucket uses a completely different logic. This bucket contains controversial legislators. These are the people who have been at the center of all the controversial legislation and legislative tactics over the last year, and they are the ones who stoked the most anger and inspired the original recall drives. Many of them are in deep blue districts. For them it is not really a question of the party losing the seat, it is more a question of whether the voters want a new and better behaved KMT legislator.

王鴻薇	Taipei 3
李彥秀	Taipei 4
羅智強	Taipei 6
徐巧芯	Taipei 7
洪孟楷	New Taipei 1
廖偉翔	Taichung 4
羅廷瑋	Taichung 6
馬文君	Nantou 1
傅崐萁	Hualien 1

This third bucket includes the three KMT floor leaders as well as several other legislators who are controversial for different reasons. To be honest, I can’t tell you why exactly I think the two from Taichung belong on this list; I just have a vague impression that they do. I surprised myself when I put together this list by leaving out several legislators who in the past would have been right at the top. But several of the former KMT floor leaders have been fairly quiet this term.

I don’t really expect anyone on this list (unless they were also on one of the previous two lists) to be recalled. That would be a seismic event that would force me to rethink many of my assumptions about Taiwanese electoral and legislative politics. But I will be paying attention to see if any of them seem to be paying a penalty for their behavior.

The 4^th bucket is completely different. This one is based on people who voted for Ko Wen-je for president. I do not consider these people to be monolithically TPP supporters. I think some of them are reliable TPP supporters, but many of them are wild cards who will vote for different parties or candidates in each election for a variety of different reasons that are difficult to summarize. More of Ko’s voters voted for a KMT legislative candidate than for a DPP legislative candidate, but there were plenty of districts in which that was not the case. More importantly, just because they voted that way last year doesn’t mean that they will vote the same way this year. This is especially true because there is only one candidate on the ballot in the recall. Remember, these are voters who don’t prefer to support either major party. It’s very hard to predict what they will do.

It’s also very difficult to know how they voted in 2024 in the legislative races in each district. Most surveys will give you a national estimate, but that doesn’t tell you anything useful about the race in Taipei 1, for example. However, I have an answer! It’s not a perfect answer, but then neither are surveys. At any rate, it’s the best answer that I know of.

My computer spent most of April and part of May running simulations to estimate how voters cast their ballots in the presidential and legislative elections. The central election Commission tells us down to the precinct level how they did this in each race, but it does not tell us how people who voted for a particular presidential candidate voted in the legislative election. I used an algorithm called multinomial ecological inference to estimate this. Let me explain using example of Taichung 5. This district has 298 precincts, and we know the exact results from each precinct for the presidential and legislative elections. This algorithm requires exactly the same number of voters in both elections, so I had to include invalid and indigenous votes in the model. In the legislative district there were 8 candidates, but six of them got fewer than 5% of the valid votes. Because this model isn’t good at estimating small numbers and each variable increases the computer time needed, I combined those six candidates together as “others.” This meant I had a 5×4 matrix, so I needed to estimate 20 values. Essentially, the algorithm starts from assuming votes are distributed equally and then starts drawing random numbers and adjusting the estimate a little bit each simulation. After many simulations, it will converge to a consistent result. How many is many? Let’s just say that running the model one time for Taichung 5 required over 72 billion random draws. What it eventually spits out is an estimate, not an exact measurement. If you did this all again, you would (hopefully) get something different but very similar. I repeated the process several times to ensure that all the results were telling basically the same story.

Taichung 5	Hou	Lai	Ko	invalid	sum
Huang (k)	87127	1215	46075	289	134706
Chuang (d)	2187	94150	10733	288	107357
Six others	1141	734	17146	233	19253
Indigenous	629	363	809	240	2040
Invalid	977	626	5238	866	7707
sum	92060	97087	80001	1915	271063

What story did the numbers tell about Taichung 5? Almost everyone who voted for Hou (95%) also voted for the KMT legislative candidate. An even higher percentage (97%) of people who voted for Lai voted for the DPP legislative candidate. Interestingly, when you compare these two numbers, the DPP candidate is leading by about 7000 votes. That’s not a huge advantage, but it is a clear margin. All he had to do was break even among Ko voters. That was not an impossible task. Nationally, Ko voters were more likely to vote for KMT candidates, but there was plenty of variation. There were lots of DPP candidates who managed this task. However, in this district the KMT candidate slaughtered the DPP candidate among Ko voters, winning this group by over 36,000 votes.

I believe that Ko voters are likely to be far less consistent from year to year than KMT or DPP voters and the TPP has undergone a remarkable degree of upheaval since the 2024 election, so this is where I’m looking for possible changes. The KMT won Taichung 5 by 27,000 votes, so it would take a pretty massive shift to overturn that result. Still, this is the kind of district I’m looking for in bucket #4.

Bucket #4 includes districts in which straight ticket DPP voters clearly outnumber straight ticket KMT voters and also in which the KMT’s superior performance among Ko voters enabled them to overcome this disadvantage and win the district. Most of these districts have already appeared in a previous bucket, but the point of this exercise is that they may also be vulnerable in a slightly different way. Also, I was surprised to see Taichung 5 on any of these lists, so I wanted to point that out.

葉元之	New Taipei 7
廖先翔	New Taipei 12
牛煦庭	Taoyuan 1
涂權吉	Taoyuan 2
萬美玲	Taoyuan 4
廖偉翔	Taichung 4
黃健豪	Taichung 5
羅廷瑋	Taichung 6
丁學忠	Yunlin 1

The 5^th bucket is everyone else. I’m surprised by how few this is.

賴士葆	Taipei 8
張智倫	New Taipei 8
林德福	New Taipei 9
羅明才	New Taipei 11
魯明哲	Taoyuan 3
呂玉玲	Taoyuan 5
邱若華	Taoyuan 6

These are all deep blue districts that the KMT has no business losing. There might be some reason that one of these legislators has trouble, but it is an individual story rather than something systematic, at least as far as I can tell.

Overall, the legislators in bucket #1 are probably the most endangered. There are enough people in that category to suggest that this mass recall could cause a major political shift. However, one point of this post is to suggest that considerations other than pure partisan balance might also affect the outcome of the recalls. If several legislators from bucket #3, for example, lose or even come close to losing, we will have a ready explanation for what happened.

KMT recall efforts collapse

The deadlines for recall campaigns against 7 more DPP legislators have now come and gone, and none of them have been able to submit the requisite number of petitions. There are still 6 campaigns left, but none of them look very hopeful. The three yesterday and today, 2 in Taipei and one in New Taipei, were the critical ones. These are highly urbanized districts with a close partisan balance and should have been the easiest places to collect signatures and the most likely for the recall to actually succeed. They could not collect enough signatures in any of them.

Well, let me put a disclaimer on that. They claimed to have collected enough signatures in Taipei 1, but they were not allowed to file those signatures since the official head of the campaign did not show up. I suspect this was a face-saving measure. They showed up with about 20 boxes that they claimed contained more than 26,000 signatures. If you look at the pictures of other campaigns submitting their signatures, there are generally a lot more than 20 boxes. I suspect they knew that the head of the campaign wasn’t going to show up so they staged a photo op claiming they would have succeeded if not for his treachery. But I don’t think they had enough signatures in the first place.

“26000” petitions from the Taipei 1 recall effort

Here are a few other pictures from campaigns that actually met the 10% threshold.

It isn’t expensive to put together a neatly arranged display of boxes with your campaign slogan printed on each one. Boxes are cheap. What it takes is time, energy, and a spark of creative joy.

This was a failure of the KMT to inspire and mobilize volunteers. There are plenty of partisan voters in the three districts with deadlines today and yesterday. The problem was that there weren’t armies of volunteers out on street corners and other public places collecting signatures and then taking them back and collating them.

A small personal anecdote highlights the difference. A few evenings ago, we saw four or five people out on a street corner holding signs asking people in traffic to recall our local KMT legislator. Keep in mind, this campaign has already collected and submitted plenty of signatures and will definitely pass the second stage. They weren’t asking for signatures. At the same time, no voting will take place for at least two months. And really, has anybody ever changed their mind about how to vote because they saw somebody on the street corner waving a sign? These people were on the street corner – in the rain – because they wanted to express themselves or they wanted to do something, anything, to help the recall. The KMT originally wanted to portray the people calling for recalls as radicals organized by the DPP. Well, there’s no competent Machiavellian organization in the world that would spend resources to mobilize 5 people to stand on the street corner two months before voting. Those people were entirely self-mobilized.

It is now highly likely that none of the recall attempts against DPP legislators will make it to the third stage.

This year’s recall vote will be an entirely one-sided affair. If you have an opportunity to vote, you will be voting on whether to recall a KMT legislator. The DPP will not have to play defense.

Our book wins major award!

Our recent book, Making punches count: The individual logic of legislative brawls, has been chosen as the 2025 Fenno Prize winner, given to the best book published in the previous year in the field of legislative studies.

I am humbled and thrilled. It took me about 12 hours to stop shaking with excitement.

I guess the best advice I can offer anyone is to figure out some way to co-author with Emily Beaulieu.

Several recalls collapse, two will surprise you!

In my first post about the recalls, I confidently predicted that the two most vulnerable legislators were the two DPP indigenous representatives. Majoritarian logic suggested that, since they were elected by minority coalitions in multi member districts, it should not be difficult for the majority to dislodge them.

Well, that turned out to be completely wrong.

A few days ago, the recall efforts against those two DPP indigenous legislators collapsed. The deadline for the second stage, in which the recall effort needs signatures from 10% of the eligible voters, arrived, and they did not have enough signatures to submit to the central election Commission. And just like that, those recall efforts were finished.

Over the last few months, my understanding of how recalls work has changed quite dramatically, and these two cases are a nice encapsulation of some of those most significant changes in my thinking.

But before I get to that, let’s take a minute to point out the obvious importance of these two failed recall efforts. There are 113 seats in the legislature, and the DPP currently has 51. They will not be reduced to 49, as I had confidently and incorrectly assumed. (To be fair, I was not alone. KMT chair Eric Chu also thought that these would be the easiest DPP legislators to recall.) That means that the DPP only need to increase their delegation by 6 members to get a majority. This is still a difficult task, but it’s easier than winning seven or eight more seats. What looked like a partisan fantasy six months ago is starting to look like a real possibility. This is going to be a dogfight, not an easy pushover.

So what have I learned thus far? When this process started, I viewed it mostly as a partisan fight in which social groups played a minor, supporting role. Over the last few months, I have continually been forced to readjust the relative weight of those two groups in my head. I now believe that the social groups are the more important of the two and that parties simply can’t do this by themselves.

The KMT campaigns against DPP legislators have mostly been run through the party organizations, and they have been disastrous. In a previous post, I wrote about how difficult it was for the KMT to put together a mere 1% of signatures for the first stage. In most districts, they tried copying names from old party lists. This led to high percentages of signatures being invalidated and numerous criminal investigations into fraud because of forged signatures of dead people. The KMT has tried to present itself as being persecuted, as if it has the right to forge signatures. But prosecuting forgery is not the same as systematically smothering democracy by using the law to eliminate all opposition parties; enforcing the law – regardless of how powerful the offender is – is a sign of a healthy democracy. The KMT leadership has also denied any responsibility for these actions. When the KMT Taipei city party office was raided by investigators, the branch chair stated that individual actors were responsible for their individual actions. In other words, she was happy to let the lowly party workers take the fall. One inevitable consequence of this is that party workers have been less willing to stick their necks out during the second stage signature drives, and the KMT seems to be having a difficult time collecting enough signatures. The two indigenous legislators were the first, and most of the other cases will have their deadline within a week. I’m curious to see how many of them will reach the 10% threshold.

The campaigns against the KMT legislators, in contrast, seem to be mostly driven by volunteers. This is especially true for the most successful ones. The DPP is making a public show of staying on the second line and leaving the front line to each individual campaign to shape as they see fit. I was skeptical that this was just a show, but I’ve read many stories about how large numbers of volunteers were crucial at various stages of the campaigns. One of the common stories is about how volunteers have combed through each signature looking for possible errors to ensure that when they submit those petitions they will be accepted. You simply can’t do this kind of thing with a limited number of party workers.

The anti KMT the campaigns are also coming up toward a significant deadline. Most of them submitted second stage positions in early May, so the time to validate those signatures is almost over. We will learn within a few weeks how many of these campaigns will move into the third and final stage. I don’t think all of them will make it, but it looks like most of them will.

Another big lesson that I’ve learned is that there is a big difference between rural and urban areas for collecting recall signatures. It is clearly much easier to collect signatures in urban areas. For example, the recall efforts in Taichung 4, 5, and 6, which just happened to be the districts in the old Taichung city, have been much more successful than the drives in districts 2, 3, and 8, which were in the old county. I’ve never looked at signatures for other things, such as referendum proposals. However, I suspect that this rural/urban divide is unique to recall petitions. When you sign a recall petition, you are directly threatening someone’s political career or someone’s political ideals. The anonymity of a big city makes this much easier. When you sign the petition in downtown Taipei, chances are no one will pay any attention to you. In a small town or even a small city where people are more likely to know each other or have stronger social networks, someone might know about and be offended by your signature. That is, there are higher social costs in more rural areas.

The partisan make up of the district was also important, but not quite as important as the urban rural divide. It was more challenging to collect signatures in an area dominated by the other party than in a swing district, but this was not an insurmountable task.

OK let’s look at some numbers. 35 KMT legislators were targeted. This table shows the 10% threshold for each district, how many signatures were submitted, and the percentage up the threshold that that represents. Since some signatures will inevitably be invalidated, organizers aimed for 130%.

Four campaigns did not make it out of the second stage. All four of these districts are among the more rural areas in Taiwan. There were some campaigns in even more rural areas that succeeded, but it’s clear that the rural areas face the more difficult task. It’s also not a coincidence that three of the four are usually considered to be deep blue areas.

The two districts in Nantou are quite interesting. By Taiwanese standards, these are quite rural districts. They do not qualify as deep blue seats, but the KMT has never lost either one of them. Even so, these are higher priority targets than you might expect. Ma Wen-chun in D1 is one of the most controversial members of the legislature, and You Hao is a first term legislator who barely won in 2024. The campaigns had a difficult time collecting signatures. They managed to submit more than the 10% threshold, but not by that much.

The job of validating signatures falls to the local election Commission. These commissions are usually dominated by whichever party runs the local government. All of the targeted KMT legislators were elected in a city or county run by the KMT. If there is going to be any bias, we should expect the most rigorous inspection possible in an effort to maximize the number of invalidated signatures. The Nantou Election commission played hardball. They invalidated 3817 and 4098 signatures in the two districts, pushing both below the 10% threshold. Some of these decisions were made on questionable merit. Many of the signatures were invalidated because they were judged to be too sloppy and illegible. Nothing in the electoral law mentions the quality of calligraphy. Others were disqualified because the signatures did not match signatures on file with the household registration agency. The Electoral Commission is not supposed to have access to signatures from the household registration bureaucracy. The central election Commission restored 199 and 508 signatures in the two districts, but most of the disqualifications were allowed to stand. Critically, both of them remain slightly below the 10% threshold.

However, both of them will probably eventually pass. The law allows campaigns that originally submitted more than 10% an extra 10 days to add more signatures if needed. The campaign against Ma Wen-chun was a little less than 2000 signature short, but they have already submitted an extra 3800 signatures and declared victory. The campaign against You Hao is only about 200 signatures short, so they should be able to overcome that deficit.

The media hasn’t reported similar stories about other districts, but you can see why the campaigns felt the need to exceed minimum threshold by a good amount. At the same time, this case demonstrates that there’s a limit to how many signatures a hostile Commission can invalidate. As a result, you can also look at the table and see which districts will definitely pass the second stage and which ones might not. The aforementioned Taichung 2, 3, and 8 as well as Hsinchu County 2, Taoyuan 5 and 6, and New Taipei 11 will face some serious headwinds. However, that leaves 23 districts that will probably sail right through the second stage. The Central election Commission has 40 days to validate all these signatures, so we will start getting official results fairly soon.

Legislator	District	threshold	submitted	%	deadline for stage 2
王鴻薇	Taipei 3	27,733	45,818	1.65	2025/5/11
李彥秀	Taipei 4	31,809	45,183	1.42	2025/5/11
羅智強	Taipei 6	23,313	36,398	1.56	2025/5/11
徐巧芯	Taipei 7	23,482	41,201	1.75	2025/5/11
賴士葆	Taipei 8	24,832	34,000	1.37	2025/5/11
洪孟楷	New Taipei 1	38,764	54,916	1.42	2025/5/12
葉元之	New Taipei 7	23,313	32,236	1.38	2025/5/6
張智倫	New Taipei 8	28,766	36,140	1.26	2025/5/13
林德福	New Taipei 9	23,830	29,474	1.24	2025/5/13
羅明才	New Taipei 11	29,664	34,076	1.15	2025/5/11
廖先翔	New Taipei 12	26,512	36,399	1.37	2025/5/12
牛煦庭	Taoyuan 1	33,956	48,788	1.44	2025/5/5
涂權吉	Taoyuan 2	30,872	41,377	1.34	2025/5/4
魯明哲	Taoyuan 3	30,122	36,337	1.21	2025/5/4
萬美玲	Taoyuan 4	30,233	41,137	1.36	2025/5/5
呂玉玲	Taoyuan 5	28,064	32,062	1.14	2025/5/4
邱若華	Taoyuan 6	28,222	33,233	1.18	2025/5/5
顏寬恒	Taichung 2	30,278	33,099	1.09	2025/5/6
楊瓊瓔	Taichung 3	26,026	26,775	1.03	2025/5/6
廖偉翔	Taichung 4	32,921	46,250	1.40	2025/5/6
黃健豪	Taichung 5	36,323	54,451	1.50	2025/5/6
羅廷瑋	Taichung 6	27,337	46,237	1.69	2025/5/6
江啟臣	Taichung 8	21,060	22,777	1.08	2025/5/5
徐欣瑩	Hsinchu County 1	21,527	未達法定門檻		2025/5/10
林思銘	Hsinchu County 2	23,287	26,431	1.14	2025/5/10
陳超明	Miaoli 1	20,586	不送件		2025/5/12
邱鎮軍	Miaoli 2	23,187	不送件		2025/5/12
馬文君	Nantou 1	18,622	20,919	1.12	2025/5/4
游 顥	Nantou 2	19,833	23,238	1.17	2025/5/4
謝衣鳳	Changhua 3	26,719	不送件		2025/5/13
丁學忠	Yunlin 1	27,501	38,040	1.38	2025/5/6
黃建賓	Taitung 1	11,534	16,651	1.44	2025/5/2
傅崐萁	Hualien 1	19,377	32,766	1.69	2025/5/4
林沛祥	Keelung 1	30,394	37,533	1.23	2025/5/23
鄭正鈐	Hsinchu City 1	35,465	53,131	1.50	2025/5/4

Let’s look at the campaigns that were spectacularly successful. Seven got at least 150% of the required signatures.

	徐巧芯	Taipei 7	1.75
	傅崐萁	Hualien 1	1.69
	羅廷瑋	Taichung 6	1.69
	王鴻薇	Taipei 3	1.65
	羅智強	Taipei 6	1.56
	黃健豪	Taichung 5	1.50
鄭正鈐		Hsinchu City 1	1.50

This isn’t the group I would have predicted to be at the head of the class. I only consider two of these to be realistic candidates for the DPP to eventually take the seat (Taichung 6 and Hsinchu City). The others are all controversial legislators in deep blue districts, including the three KMT floor leaders. The most surprising is Fu Kun-chi. The other six districts on this list are very urban, but Hualien is one of the most rural districts in Taiwan. Fu is nicknamed “king of Hualien.” He and his wife have governed the county since 2010, and they’ve handily won every race they’ve contested in the last 20 years or so. This is precisely the kind of district that should be very difficult to collect signatures in. On the other hand, Fu is the KMT floor leader and the architect of the KMT’s controversial legislative strategies and agenda. Activists have an especially intense antipathy toward him. It’s also possible that he’s dominated local politics for too long, and other factions in the KMT see an opportunity to finally get rid of him.

I’m not sure what to make of these numbers going forward. The signature drives are about passionate and intensity. The third stage will involve regular citizens going out to vote. Passion still matters, but not nearly as much. We might be reverting to normal partisan patterns. On the other hand, turnout will probably be lower than in a normal general election, so it is possible that energy will turn out to be a decisive factor. I expect that most of those seven will survive the recall, but we’ve never been through something like this before, so we can’t be too confident.

Let’s look quickly at the anti DPP campaigns.

Legislator	District	threshold	submitted	deadline for stage 2
吳思瑤	Taipei 1	26,717		2025/6/7
吳沛憶	Taipei 5	23,392		2025/6/7
李坤城	New Taipei 3	26,576		2025/6/23
蘇巧慧	New Taipei 5	25,707		2025/6/8
張宏陸	New Taipei 6	22,202		2025/6/8
吳琪銘	New Taipei 10	29,072		2025/6/8
蔡其昌	Taichung 1	22,346		2025/6/6
何欣純	Taichung 7	32,967		2025/6/6
林俊憲	Tainan 5	26,569		2025/6/10
王定宇	Tainan 6	26,038		2025/6/10
黃 捷	Kaohsiung 6	31,366		2025/6/14
許智傑	Kaohsiung 7	29,351		2025/6/14
陳俊宇	Yilan	36,523		2025/6/24
陳 瑩	Plains indigenous	21,004	不送件	2025/5/31
伍麗華	Mountain indigenous	22,817	不送件	2025/5/31

As I stated at the outset, the deadline for the two indigenous legislators has already passed. Several other deadlines are coming up in the next few days, so we will have a much clearer idea about the success of the KMT’s strategy very soon.

As I was going through this list, it struck me that there are a few missing districts. Specifically, the DPP holds three seats in Changhua. This is a traditional battleground county, and two of these seats are fairly competitive. Changhua 2 would certainly have been in my top 10 list of KMT targets. It’s strange to me that the KMT just decided to pass on these districts. In retrospect though, Changhua is rural enough that collecting signatures might have been difficult, and the local party branch is probably quite happy that it doesn’t have to deal with any legal problems coming from forged signatures.

The soap opera in Taipei 1 deserves special mention. Rosalia Wu is one of the DPP floor leaders, so the KMT would love to cause problems for her. Unfortunately, they keep stepping on their own feet. The official head of the campaign announced that he was withdrawing after the first stage due to the high number of dead people signing petitions. I originally assumed that he was trying to avoid legal responsibility, but it recently came out that the story was much more personal. One of the dead people who signed the petition was his mother. In fact, her name appeared twice with two different signatures. It isn’t clear whether he felt shame, anger, humiliation, disgust, or something else, but he decided he didn’t want anything more to do with the petition drive. When you file the petition, you designate and an alternate who can take over if the head dies. Otherwise, changing the official head of the campaign requires signatures from half of the people who signed the first stage. So the campaign had to put aside collecting second stage signatures for a week or so and go back and collect first stage signatures. They submitted their application to change the head to the CEC, but this application was rejected because about 1/3 of the people who signed were not in fact signatories of the first stage. So the official head of the campaign remains the guy who refuses to be associated with it. Legally, I’m not sure what this means. I had assumed that the head of the campaign had to sign his name when officially submitting the second stage signatures. Does that mean they can’t submit? It’s all a big snafu.

We will know more in a few days, and I guess I will have to update my understanding of how recalls work once again. As always, I look forward to being wrong.

The continuing recall saga

For several weeks it seemed like there was no new news on the recalls, and then suddenly there was an avalanche and I quickly fell behind. So let’s try to recap.

First round

In the first round, recall campaigns have to get petitions from 1% of the eligible voting population. The anti-blue campaigns quickly and easily passed this threshold for all 35 district KMT legislators other than the ones from the two offshore islands. The anti-green campaigns targeted 17 DPP legislators and initially failed to pass the threshold for any of them. However, the law gives 10 more days to provide extra signatures, so 15 of these campaigns eventually passed the first stage. 2 campaigns (Chiayi City and Chiayi County 2) did not provide additional signatures, thereby giving up.

Indigenous legislators

In a previous post, I suggested that the two most likely legislators to be recalled were the two DPP indigenous legislators. I also noted that they would not be replaced since by elections are only held if more than half the seats in the district are vacant. That latter point might not be valid for much longer. A bill has been introduced to allow by elections to fill vacant indigenous seats, so presumably the KMT could take those two seats. I haven’t heard any updates on this bill since it was introduced, so I don’t know if its passage is imminent. It probably depends on how likely the recalls are to change the partisan balance of the legislature.

Let me comment here that one reason indigenous legislators are elected in multi member districts is to give minority tribes an opportunity for representation. Recalls are inherently majoritarian. They just don’t make a lot of sense when mixed with electoral systems designed to promote minority representation.

Second round

In the second round, recall campaigns have 60 days to collect signatures from 10% of the eligible population. Most of the anti KMT campaigns have about one or two weeks left to finish collecting these signatures. The anti DPP campaigns needed an extra month or so to finish the first round, so they are just starting their second round petition drives.

It appears to me that the anti KMT campaigns are mostly doing quite well and are generally on track to meet the threshold.

Let me use my own district as an example. I have gotten 2 pieces of mail over the last several weeks telling me why I should sign the petition and how to do so. They list 29 places where they will be collecting signatures, many of them operating several days each week. This is not an exhaustive list. They also pasted a note to our flyer saying they will be in our community center on Wednesday nights to collect signatures, and people have been collecting signatures outside our local traditional market. Folded inside our flyer were two particularly interesting pieces of paper. One was the petition form, so we could fill it out at home and just drop it off at any location. The other was an instruction form, telling us exactly how to fill out the petition and which mistakes not to make. (For example, if you live on the third floor., you must write 三樓 instead of 3F.) There are lots of people doing hard work, not just to volunteer to collect the signatures, but also to do things like fold up all the mailers and to place them in everybody’s mailbox.

In previous posts, I simplified matters by calling these DPP campaigns. Let me spend a little space to clarify what I mean by that. Most of the recall campaigns reject the idea that they are DPP organs. They think of themselves as social movements. In some, perhaps many, cases that is entirely justified. Some of these groups were formed or inspired by the Bluebird protests and started organizing in spring last year after the KMT and TPP forced a bill to expand legislative power through the legislature using controversial methods. They have been working on a recall effort for nearly a year. These groups are leading the DPP, not the other way around. However, it is highly implausible that 35 of these groups formed independently. You simply don’t get a spontaneous grassroots movement in every single district. There has to be a bit of coordination for everyone else. This does not mean that most of these are actually DPP campaigns. The DPP simply doesn’t have that many party workers. Instead, the party has deep roots in society that it can draw on. It can encourage friendly organizations to take up the cause and to mobilize their networks. It can advise groups on themes to stress, how to put together and distribute propaganda, how to instruct their volunteers, and several other necessary but usually overlooked details. The social organizations do most of the actual work. In some cases, they do almost all of the work. However, without party coordination, you would have spotty coverage.

Let’s also acknowledge that is better for both the party and the recall effort if this is presented as a grassroots social movement rather than a professionally organized partisan campaign. The recall seems much more legitimate and has a potentially broader audience if it is motivated by anger from ordinary citizens rather than being just more normal party conflict.

It is an oversimplification to call this these recalls a DPP or KMT partisan campaign, but it is also a bit misleading to focus entirely on the social movements. However, for the sake of parsimony, I’ll continue to be guilty of the former error.

Let’s turn now to the anti DPP side.

The KMT petition drives are just getting underway, but so far I don’t like the signs I’m seeing. There are two big problems. First, whenever the KMT holds a big activity, it always seems to be in KMT-dominated area. They’ve had major events in Hualien, Miaoli, and Taoyuan, places that have exactly zero DPP legislators. The KMT party leadership seems more interested in convincing its base to vote against recalls of KMT legislators than in collecting signatures to put DPP legislators on the recall ballot. The problem is that the window for collecting signatures is right now while the vote for recalls will not occur for several months. Second, the people involved in individual recalls seem to be as interested in splashy news stories as in doing the mundane hard work. I have seen more news stories about Lai Yi-jen, the guy running the campaign against Rosalia Wu in Taipei 1 than all the leaders of the anti KMT campaigns combined. And then there was the guy who dressed up in a Nazi uniform complete with a copy of Mein Kampf … because that’s an appropriate way to protest the DPP?? Maybe the high-profile strategy will inspire lots of people too sign petitions. Maybe the KMT is actually doing the hard work under the radar. But what I’m seeing doesn’t give me much confidence. They don’t seem to be tapping into their social networks in society quite as effectively as the DPP. Still, they have six weeks to get their house in order, so it may eventually work out for them.

Fraud

In a previous post I mentioned that KMT petitions had an astounding number of signatures from dead people, and this would inevitably cause legal problems since it was obvious fraud. Well, those legal problems are starting to surface. Several KMT figures have been formally investigated and, most dramatically, KMT Taipei city headquarters was raided by investigators who seized several boxes of documents.

The KMT response to this has been predictable: the DPP is unfairly weaponizing the justice system and is selectively only prosecuting the KMT. They are planning to hold a major demonstration in front of the presidential office this weekend. I suppose they couldn’t ignore this high-profile raid, but I’m not sure drawing more attention to the case is the right move either. There is a good reason prosecutors are concentrating on the KMT: they are involved in almost all the cases. According to one report, there were 1923 cases of dead people signing petitions against DPP legislators and only 12 cases of dead people signing petitions against KMT legislators. (The exact numbers vary in different reports, but it’s always an enormous one-sided gap.) Only one of those numbers strikes me as an indicator of systematic fraud. I’m not sure the KMT should be screaming loudly that is unfair when they are prosecuted for committing obvious fraud. “Forgery is our right!” doesn’t seem like a winning slogan to me.

Wayne said what?

And then there is the strange case of KMT golden boy, Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an. He showed up at an (illegal) protest to show solidarity with the party. So far so good. But then he opened his mouth and offered a “constructive” solution. Since the DPP was serious about pushing recalls, Chiang proposed that the KMT legislative caucus should vote no confidence in the premier. This would allow the president to dissolve the legislature and call early elections. Chiang argued that the population could then vote overwhelmingly against the DPP, demonstrating a lack of confidence in the president.

This is a head scratcher. The DPP has been angling for several months to try to create a de facto early national election. They can’t put some of their primary villains on the ballot because those people are on the KMT and TPP party lists. They also have to fight against the local arguments that the KMT legislators haven’t done anything individually deserving of a recall, and besides they are really good at constituency service. Further, right now the DPP is doing pretty well in polls; the KMT’s best strategy is to play for time and wait for public opinion to turn as world events (such as the Trump tariffs) start to bite. Chiang’s solution would forfeit all that. Oh, and his solution also wouldn’t solve any of the problems. There is no such thing as a vote of no confidence in the president. Lai will remain the president no matter how people vote on the legislature. And Chiang was complaining most sanctimoniously about selective use of the judicial system. Well, the fraud cases against the KMT’s forged signatures wouldn’t go away even in Chiang‘s rosiest scenario. It’s hard to figure out what he was thinking. As you might imagine, other KMT figures haven’t exactly been enthusiastically echoing his call to dissolve the legislature.

For me, there was one big takeaway from this incident. Chiang is not ready for the national stage. He is not a deep thinker, a great strategic mind, or a visionary leader. In my mind, his stock has a potential future national leader just plunged precipitously.

Intra party politics and perverse incentives

So far, everything I’ve written in this post is basically part of the public discourse. So let me give you a couple of somewhat more original thoughts.

I can’t stop thinking about the case of Lee Yen-hsiu, our local legislator at Academia Sinica (and everyone else in Taipei 4, I suppose). She won her election in 2024 by over 17,000 votes, so even there even though there is a case to be made that she is vulnerable, she probably isn’t at the top of the danger list among KMT incumbents. I expect that she will be favored to win reelection in 2028 and beyond.

There’s another local KMT politician from an even more prominent Nangang clan, Chueh Mei-sha. Lee was elected to the Taipei City Council in 1998, and Chueh was elected four years later in 2002. Chueh would like to be in the legislature (she lost the polling primary in 2015 and considered running in 2023), but her path is blocked for the foreseeable future by her copartisan, Lee. What if Lee somehow lost the recall vote? She would be ineligible to run in the ensuing by-election, and someone would have to represent the KMT. I’m sure it would break Chueh’s heart to see Lee lose, but I’m also sure she would, with a strong sense of partisan duty, take up the mantle as the next person in line to defend the KMT seat. Sarcasm aside, this could be Chueh’s best chance to get into the legislature. It’s not a deep blue district, but it is a blue leaning district and the KMT would be favored to win the by-election. Chueh has an incentive not just to not work hard to defeat the recall, but maybe even to quietly promote it. She can’t be too obvious about it because she needs a reasonably unified party behind her to win the by-election, but there’s no denying that her career could be helped a successful recall vote against Lee.

This is not an isolated example. There are cases all over the country of ambitious politicians who would love to move up to the legislature but are currently blocked by an incumbent from their own party. This applies to both parties, but I suspect it’s more serious right now for the KMT since they seem to have more incumbents in vulnerable seats who could lose with just the slightest push.

How about another variation on this theme? I’m thinking of Wang Hung-wei in Taipei 3 and Hsu Chiao-hsin in Taipei 7, who have emerged as some of the loudest and most provocative voices against the government and (arguably) in favor of pro-China policies.

If you are a moderate KMT supporter who doesn’t particularly like the DPP but who would prefer a less aggressive approach then the current scorched earth tactics we see in the legislature, maybe a recall wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Wang, who maintained a New Party affiliation until just a few years ago, seems a bit radical for her district. This might be their chance to replace her with another KMT politician who is a little bit more open to compromise. The DPP has never won Taipei 3 or Taipei 7, so recalling radical KMT politicians is not the same as handing the district over to the other party. This is not an easy argument to make – a vote against the KMT politician is not necessarily a vote against the KMT. However, it isn’t that far from what was being argued at a pro-recall rally just last weekend – we’re not against the ROC, we’re only against people who kiss up to the PRC.

The point here is that recall elections may not be as simple as ordinary general elections. At the very least, there are different partisan machinations involved, so it might not be as simple as looking at previous election results and predicting the outcome.

Do you think many legislators will actually be recalled?

Among the people I’ve been talking to (and the people they’ve been talking to), the consensus seems to be that this recall campaign is fairly unlikely to change the partisan balance in the legislature. Some of them think the recall campaigns will fizzle out, and more of them seem to think that even if the recall succeeds, the out-party will not be able to flip the seat in the ensuing by-election. I’ll discuss that latter point in the next section. Here, let me focus on the recall votes themselves.

Before I explain my thinking, let me lay my cards on the table. I’m at the far end of the spectrum. I think there is a fair chance at the recall notes will succeed and that the legislature will flip to a DPP majority. I don’t think it’s inevitable or even highly likely, but I’m not dismissing it out of hand the way many other people are.

Let’s start with the observation that, as of right now, all the positive energy and good vibes seem to be entirely on one side. The KMT is complaining about unfairness, criticizing their own leaders, and not very focused on the goals of either passing or defeating recalls. They are also distracted by the infighting over the upcoming party chair election.

Next, let’s remember that the threshold for recall is absurdly low. You only need at least 25% of eligible voters. Most legislators got 30 or 35% in the general election to win their seats, so arguably it is easier to recall a legislator than to elect them in the first place. This low threshold means that legislators cannot rely on low turnout to defeat the recall; they have to mobilize their supporters to go out and vote against it. That might be a problem even in a blue district if the green slide is more energized.

Another thing to think about is the TPP. Ko Wen-je got 26% of the presidential vote, and a lot of those voters might not have voted if he had not been on the ballot. He will not be on the ballot in the recall votes, so there is a real possibility that lot of his voters will just stay home. This isn’t their fight, and many of them think that the KMT is just as corrupt as the DPP. I’m currently doing a study of TPP voters in district races. They voted in many surprising directions, but it’s fair to say that a good number of KMT incumbents hold their seats because of TPP support. If it’s purely blue versus green, the green base is bigger and some of those KMT incumbents don’t look quite so safe anymore.

Finally, this is a national recall. We have never had anything like this before. We simply don’t know how this is going to play out. For example, consider negative campaigning. Negative campaigning is a staple of regular elections: you might not like me, but you hate my opponent. In a recall campaign, there is only one candidate on the ballot, so negative campaigning might be much more difficult.

We still have a few months to go and a lot of things can change in the meantime. But right now, it feels like the recalls are taking on a life of their own. People who weren’t giving them a second thought a month or two ago seem to be taking them a lot more seriously now.

OK, suppose the recalls succeed, what about the by elections?

This is where the rubber really meets the road. If the goal is to change the partisan balance of the legislature, you have to eventually win both the recalls and the ensuing by-elections. Given that the DPP couldn’t win these districts in 2024, why should we assume that it will be easier in 2025?

One important consideration is that legislators who are recalled are not eligible to run in the by election. We are all familiar with the concept of incumbency advantage. A wave of successful recalls deprives a party of one of its biggest assets. Instead of a formidable roster of A team incumbents, the challenging party can contest a set of open seats running against the B team.

Let’s leave reality for a moment and go back to Taipei 4 and (my imagined saga of) the tension between Lee and Chueh. Suppose Lee is recalled and the KMT nominates Chueh to run in the by-election. What should Lee do? Presumably, she would like to regain her seat in the legislature, but she cannot do this until the next general election in 2028. What if Chueh wins? Lee would then face an incumbent from her own party. Even if Lee chose to challenge her in the primary (risking the ire of many KMT partisans), Chueh might spend the next few years consolidating her support and be too powerful for Lee to topple in a primary. It would be much more convenient for Lee if Chueh were to (tragically) lose the by-election and leave the seat open for her to triumphantly reconquer in 2028. Intra party machinations are always present, but they are heightened by the recalls because of the possibility of temporarily removing an incumbent from the equation.

OK, that was fun to think about, but it probably won’t be a big effect.

The big effect comes from the fact that strange things happen in by elections. You can see results that would normally be unthinkable. The DPP has won legislative seats in deep, deep blue areas such as Hsinchu County and Taoyuan 3 (Zhongli) and the KMT nearly won arguably the deepest green seat in the entire country, Tainan 2. By elections don’t occur in a vacuum. They usually happen after another election, and they are almost always shaped by the outcome of that previous election. When one side does very well, its supporters are energized and jazzed for the next competition while the other side is demoralized and doesn’t want to think about politics at all. By elections tend to have lower turnout, and that can be particularly skewed by differences in enthusiasm. And so you get unexpected results, with parties dramatically over performing their normal standards.

If I’m right about the momentum for the recalls and the DPP does quite well, it would not be surprising at all if the KMT were consumed by recriminations and backstabbing and unable to put their best foot forward in the by elections.

In short, I don’t think it is impossible that the DPP could find itself with a majority in the legislature in November.

Let me end this piece by reminding everyone that I’m pretty far outside the mainstream on this. A lot of smart people think that this recall movement will turn out to have a limited impact. I’ve been wrong before, and I’m sure I’ll be wrong again.

Surprising developments in the recalls

I did not expect to be writing about the recall again so soon, but things are not unfolding as I had expected.

We are still in the first stage, in which each recall campaign must be proposed by signatures from at least 1% of the eligible voting population in the district. Since most districts have about 300,000 eligible voters, that means they need about 3,000 signatures. This shouldn’t be very difficult for the KMT or DPP, since both have deep roots in society and extensive networks to draw on. Or at least that’s what I thought…

Let’s start with the current state of affairs. Each recall drive was allowed to present petitions starting February 1, as that marked one year since legislators took office. The electoral commissions then had 25 days to review those petitions and validate the signatures. On February 26, we got the news about the first 28 cases. 19 of them had passed, but 9 of them had too many signatures invalidated and did not pass the threshold. Even more stunning, the 19 that passed were all against KMT legislators and the nine that failed were all against DPP legislators. Yesterday, we got another batch of results. 13 more recalls against KMT legislators smoothly passed the first stage, while three more recalls against DPP legislators all failed to pass the threshold.

In other words, all 32 drives against KMT legislators are going as scheduled, while all 12 drives against DPP legislators have thus far failed to clear the first barrier. This includes the two indigenous DPP legislators who I identified as highly likely to lose their seats.

This doesn’t mean that the DPP legislators are all safe. The recall drives still have a 10-day window to correct any errors and to collect new signatures. It’s possible that the KMT will get its business in order and pass all 12 recalls. The 10 day window for the first batch will expire in a few days, so we’ll have a much better idea of just what happened (though we’ll still have to wait awhile for those new signatures to be verified). Still, it’s stunning to see the KMT scrambling in this fashion trying to salvage what I thought should have been a perfunctory task. What happened?

If you listen to Ling Tao (Taoyuan city council member and deputy director of a KMT think tank), this is a clear example of the DPP-dominated central election commission manipulating outcomes unfairly. Ling offered no evidence for his charges; for him the fact that all the KMT drives had failed and all the DPP drives had succeeded made it obvious that the CEC must be putting its thumb on the scale.

However, all the other evidence, both objective and circumstantial, suggests that the problems with the KMT recall drives are the KMT’s own fault.

It is worth noting that the local city and county election commissions, not the CEC, are responsible for actually reviewing the petitions. Every one of these 32 KMT legislators was elected in a city or county with a KMT executive. Similarly, many of the failed recall drives against DPP legislators were also in KMT governed cities and counties. I believe the election commissions are generally professional and neutral. However, if they do face any political pressure, it would be from their local city or county executive. Apparently, these local collection commissions did not feel much pressure to help out their KMT legislators or punish DPP legislators. We haven’t heard any grumbling about how the central election commission did not respect the results from the local election commissions, which you might have expected to hear if the conspiracy theory were correct.

The first strong piece of evidence against the conspiracy theory I saw was this online article from united daily news pointing out that many of the signatures in the New Taipei city recalls came from people who were already dead. 84 dead people signed in District 5, 139 in District 3, and 180 in district 6. You can imagine that maybe a dozen or so people signed and then died in the next month, but this is too many. Almost all of these people were already dead when their names were put on that list. The recall organizers tried to put a humorous spin on this by explaining that the people were so mad at the DPP government that their souls were signing from the grave, but even they seem to understand that they had been caught red-handed.

A ranting interview from 2024 KMT vice presidential candidate Jaw Shao-kang reinforced the idea that this was fundamentally a KMT failure, not DPP dirty tricks. He repeatedly blamed KMT party workers for not doing enough, insisting that the KMP had plenty of money to do this kind of thing and wondering what the heck they were doing with all those resources. Similarly, KMT legislator Wang Hung-wei blamed party workers. These arrows are pointed inwards.

From these and several other sources, a picture of what the KMT did begins to emerge. It isn’t clear whether the KMT actually went out and collected any signatures in normal petition drives. It is clear that many of the names on their lists came from old rosters of party members or supporters that the KMT had compiled over many years. Apparently, they simply took these names and copied them down on the petitions.

If you look at that udn online story, there is a very fuzzy table detailing why signatures were rejected in the three New Taipei districts against DPP legislators. Let me reproduce that as best I can:

clause	Content/Problem	D5	D3	D6
.
	Estimated threshold*	2570	2657	2220
.
	Signatures Submitted	2735	2719	2519
	Signatures Accepted	1819	1831	1614
.
79.1.1	Age	1	1	0
	Residency	443	407	404
	Criminal	55	15	4
	Death	84	139	180
	Multiple causes	43	8	31
79.1.2	active military	3	1	2
	active national service	8	0	0
	Civil servant	14	30	2
79.1.3	name incorrect or unclear	71	149	56
	Address incorrect or unclear	131	278	78
	ID number incorrect or unclear	70	59	98
79.1.4	No signature	1	0	23
79.1.5	Forgery	0	1	0
83.4		0	0	0
.
	Signatures Rejected	918	1088	895

I estimated the threshold based on the number of eligible voters in the district in the 2024 legislative election. The actual number will be slightly different. You can see that the organizers did not submit many extra signatures. In all three of these districts, they were just barely over the threshold. If you are sure about the quality of your signatures, this makes sense. People are not allowed to sign in both the 1^st and 2^nd stages, so you don’t want to burn extra signatures in the first stage if you don’t have to. However, if you know your signatures are problematic, you might want to submit a few hundred extra signatures.

The most common problem was residency. If the KMT was working from old lists, this was a predictable problem. People often move and change their official residency. Many of these people will no longer live in the same legislative district. I suspect that most of the cases listed under clauses 79.1.1 and 79.1.2 of the election and recall law are unfixable. In contrast, the cases under 79.1.3 should be mostly fixable with a little bit of effort.

Of course, the problem was that the KMT wasn’t willing to put much effort into the signature drive. One of the points that Jaw made in his ranting interview was it is OK to work from lists of supporters, but you need to call them up and ask then for permission to use their name and make sure their information is up to date. Apparently the KMT party workers could not be troubled to do this.

Nevertheless, all three of these districts need fewer than 1000 additional signatures. 10 days should be an adequate window to obtain that many valid signatures. If most of the 12 districts are similar to these three, I suspect many, perhaps most, of the KMT recall drives will eventually pass the first stage.

There is one other big problem for the KMT: forgery. Someone signed all those rejected petitions, and apparently in most cases it wasn’t the person named in the petition. Forging someone’s signature is a serious violation of law, punishable by several years in prison. If the election commission suspects that signatures are forged (perhaps because many of the signatures look like they’re signed by the same person), it can send out an official notice of inquiry to the voter in question asking them if they did in fact sign this petition. However, non-response to such an inquiry is insufficient to delete a signature from the rolls. One can imagine that the easiest course for any bureaucrat is simply to let things slide and pretend not to see any similarities in signatures. DPP indigenous legislature Wu Li-hua complained that the Taipei city Electoral Commission had not sent out a single official inquiry even though there were ample reasons to suspect forgery in the recall drive against her.

Nevertheless, some election commissions do send out official inquiries. Many of these voters are sympathetic to the recall even if they didn’t sign it — they were after all on the KMT’s list of party members or supporters. Many others will simply ignore these inquiries or can’t be bothered to give a timely response. In other words, the likelihood of catching a forgery is fairly low.

However, it is not impossible. Chiayi City sent out 44 official inquiries and received 4 responses. One of these was a woman named Cheng who had not signed the petition. Cheng said she had signed up as a KMT member with a friend over 20 years ago, but she had never participated in any KMT activities. She did not appreciate her name being used in this recall petition, hired a lawyer, and sued the recall drive. The organizer of the Chiayi city recall drive announced that they would not be continuing to the second stage. However, I don’t think abandoning the recall drive makes the legal suit go away.

It is one thing to ignore similar signatures suggesting that one person has signed for multiple people. Signatures of dead people are harder to wave away, especially if the person died before the recall drive was announced or before the target was even elected to the legislature. Those signatures are outright forgeries, and it seems as if they are occurring in nearly every one of the KMT’s recall drives. Someone is responsible. The DPP is starting to talk about legal repercussions and suggesting that the judicial system should investigate these crimes. This part of the recall soap opera is just getting started.

OK, enough of these legal questions. Let’s shift the focus back to political strategy. I can’t stop thinking about the calendar. The KMT pushed the revisions to the election and recall law making petition drives much more cumbersome through the legislature on December 20. Remember that no recall drives are allowed to be filed in the first year of a legislator’s term, meaning that February 1^st was the first day petition drives could be filed. When the legislature passed the amendments, the CEC issued a statement saying that any drive filed before the new law was promulgated would be held under the old rules. There was plenty of time between December 20 and February 1 to deal with objections from the executive branch. However, speaker Han did not send legislation to the executive branch for several weeks. This was a highly irregular decision. Because of this delay, the legislature was not able to finish overriding the executive veto until February 18. All of the recall drives we are discussing now were filed in that window between February 1 and February 18, a window that did not have to exist. If most of the KMT recall drives fail in the 1^st and 2^nd stages and most of the DPP recall drives sail through these first two stages (as seems quite likely at the moment), I can’t shake the feeling that the failure to send the law through normally was an enormous strategic mistake by the KMT. If they weren’t going to be able to manage this task, they could have at least made it more difficult for the other side.

(Aside: Let’s take a minute to appreciate the irony that the KMT justified this amendment requiring ID photocopies by claiming it was necessary to deter precisely the type of wholesale fraud that they are currently engaging in. Why does this type of thing seem to be so normal in our contemporary world? Sigh.)

32 recalls against KMT legislators have now passed the first stage. That is every KMT district legislator except for the two from Kinmen and Matsu, the four indigenous legislators, the two legislators from Miaoli, and the representative from Keelung. I’m not sure, but I have an impression that those last three cases might still be pending. For all practical purposes, the entire delegation of KMT district legislators is facing a recall. Most of these recalls will eventually fail since most KMT legislators represent solidly blue districts. However, I can think of reasons for as many as 15 of these legislators to be at least a little bit concerned. But that’s a topic for another post.

If the DPP drives continue to sail through the second stage and the KMT recall drives continue to sputter and many stall out in the first 2 stages, there is a possibility that when it comes time to actually vote on the recalls in six months or so, we will be faced with a one-sided choice. Rather than both sides being at risk, it is possible that the only question will be whether to punish the KMT or not. I haven’t thought a whole lot about how that might change the political discussion over the next few months or how it will affect the strategies of the three main parties. Frankly, this is a scenario that I’m shocked to be considering at all.