MCFAP math

[Posted in the wee hours; edited heavily for clarity and accuracy after sleeping.]

I generally don’t pay much attention to new and unproven parties. I prefer to make them prove that their viability before I devote much energy to them. Still, this story is too much fun to pass up.

New parties make up all kinds of outlandish claims, so I shouldn’t be surprised when one claims it can win lots of party list seats in the upcoming legislative elections. Still, this one stretches the limits of credulity. The MCFAP[1] claims that it can win 10 PR seats, and it has the numbers to back that up!

Solidarity.tw picked up on a detail that I missed when I originally read the article in Chinese. The MCFAP[2] claims that it asked voters to cast invalid votes in the 2014 elections, and voters responded by casting 1.8 million invalid votes. If the MCFAP[3] can consolidate these 1.8 million votes, it can win 10 PR seats.

Now wait just a minute? Were there actually 1.8 million invalid votes? That sounds like a lot, considering there were about 13 million total votes cast in the 2012 presidential election. Surely we would have noticed if 15% of all votes had been invalid in 2014!

So I went back and checked. Sure enough, there were 1.8 million invalid votes. Well almost. You have to round up from 1.72 million, but that’s just an accounting error. Of course, that 1.72 million is the total number across all nine types of elections, which seems like it might be cheating a bit. In the mayor and magistrate elections, there were only 250,000 invalid votes. Almost half of the invalid votes (857,000) were in the neighborhood chief 村里長 elections. So if the MCFAP[4] thinks the legislative elections are just like grassroots elections and not at all like mayoral elections, they are halfway to their claim! Alternatively, they could try to let their supporters cast three to five votes apiece, just like they did in 2014. That seems fair, right?

But wait, there’s one more problem with MCFAP[5] math: 1.8 million votes doesn’t get you 10 PR seats. In 2012, the TSU and PFP combined to win 1.9 million votes. (That’s 10% more than the total number of invalid votes from last year, by the way.) For those 1.9 million votes, they got 5 seats.

The A in MCFAP stands for academics, by which they mean educators.[6] Let’s give the party the benefit of the doubt and assume those educators are all Three People’s Principles 三民主義 teachers since I’d be terrified to find out any of them taught math.

[1] According to the wiki page, the official English name is the China Production Party, but as ジェームス and R point out in the comments below, that is probably a mistake. I’m going to follow Solidarity.tw and use the acronym from their website which is, after all, much more fun sounding. Also, I don’t know how to pronounce ジェームス, so in the future I’m just going to read it as “McFap.”

[2] Doesn’t that name sound like it should be some sort of Scottish Independence Party?

[3] Chinese name: 軍公教聯盟黨; literally Military, Civil servants, and Educators Alliance Party. It’s always good to tell the vast majority of society that your party won’t be looking out for their interests.

[4] Why are they both an “alliance” and a “party?” Shouldn’t one of the teachers tell them that redundancy makes for bad writing?

[5] How could they translate that name into “China Production Party” anyway? The party’s website doesn’t explain what the acronym stands for. Solidarity.tw thinks it is Military, Civil servants, Firefighters, and Academics Party. I suppose it could also by Military, Civil servants, and Fducators Alliance Party.

[6] Unless it means “alliance.”