Taiwan's close election is rapidly heading into farce. It hurts to lose, especially when the vote is so close. And even more so in such dramatic circumstances, such a day after an attempted assassination on the President. A list of the KMT's grievances doesn't provide a compelling arguement that there was widespread electoral fraud. In any election where you have 20 million voters there are going to be errors and mistakes. So long as they are small and not systematic they will, in effect, cancel each other out. That's not the problem.

The level of suspicion is high. An otherwise perfectly rational Taiwanese woman in our office is convinced the shooting on Friday was a set-up by President Chen. When I put to her that it was a hell of a risk to take even if the accusation was true, her response was that Chen is a greedy politician who will do anything for power. She felt the KMT was "robbed" and pointed to the large number of spoiled ballots despite there being a movement this time called "Millions of Invalid Votes" which explains the large amount of invalid votes cast (2.5% of the total).

A very good and rational overview of the election and its aftermath is at Asia Times. The problem is rationality and logic isn't often brought to bear in matters such as this. I hope the Taiwanese courts can avoid getting caught up in all the hysteria, otherwise the implications for Taiwan's young democracy are dire. Elections should be settled via the ballot box, no matter how imperfect, and not by judges.

Does this matter? You bet it does - do not underestimate the feeling on the Mainland about Taiwan. Any further drift towards independence (which is part of Chen's platform) will be met with the only answer the PRC knows - shows of force. Forget about North Korea; there's a much greater chance of this quickly turning into a flashpoint that drags in far more than just China and Taiwan. At the moment China is adopting a wait and see approach; that's about the only good thing to come out of the weekend's events so far.