I know I said I wouldn't comment any more on Taiwan's election but like any good politician my promises are only valid until I break them. If only Al Gore had thought of this in 2000 things could have been very different.

Note: there's a SCMP fisking too...

From the SCMP:

Legislators from the two camps are meeting today and through the weekend to finalise amendments to the electoral law to allow the president to issue an executive order for a ballot recount. But lawmakers from the opposition Kuomintang and People First Party alliance demanded inserting an "assassination clause" that would effectively require the Central Election Commission to nullify last Saturday's election.

The controversial clause states the commission must call off a presidential election if a candidate suffers injury or dies in the seven days before the election. The clause, the opposition demands, must have retrospective power and apply to Saturday's poll.

You lose the election, but it's close. The winner even offers a recount. But you don't actually want a recount because you might lose that. So you dredge up all sorts of spurious reasons the vote was "rigged". If 20 million people cast their votes, of course there are going to be occasional discrepancies. I once drew Bart Simpson on my ballot paper in Australia and gave it to a mate in the next booth who added Homer. They managed to declare a winner in that poll nonetheless. The pan-blues have yet to provide any reasonable evidence of systematic vote-rigging; so far all they've got is some isolated incidents. Even the High Court in Taiwan said the opposition can't yet file a suit on this, because that's the law. Remember that pesky little thing, the law?

The longer this goes on the better Chen looks and the worse the KMT looks. Chen just has to keep his mouth shut and let the KMT completely self-destruct.
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The SCMP's CK Lau, Executive Editor of Policy and Bullshit, has come up with the following editorial which I bring to you in its full stupidity:

Taiwan is the only Chinese society that has become a full democracy. But the conduct of its presidential poll last Saturday was a great disappointment to all Chinese who had hoped that the island would set an example for the democratisation of the mainland and Hong Kong.

The alleged electoral frauds associated with the razor-thin victory of incumbent Chen Shui-bian over contender Lien Chan suggested manipulation of the electoral process of the gravest kind.

The suspicious circumstances that surrounded an attempted assassination of Mr Chen and his running mate Annette Lu Hsiu-lien on the eve of the election have led many to suspect that it was engineered to produce a sympathy vote.

Other irregularities have also occurred in the election to make one wonder if Taiwan has a credible electoral system.

Under-aged children who accompanied their elders into a polling station were caught on television casting "their" votes. The results of ballot counts in some areas were allegedly not accurately reported to the Central Election Commission.

Local governments with political affiliations reportedly put their sympathisers in charge of polling stations. The fact that exceptionally large numbers of ballots were declared invalid in some districts controlled by Mr Chen's Democratic Progressive Party has lent credence to such concerns.

In the event, the team comprising the Kuomintang's Mr Lien and the People First Party's James Soong Chu-yu lost by 0.24 per cent of the vote, even though it was leading by a modest margin in opinion polls before Mr Chen and Ms Lu were shot. As many as 337,297 ballots, or 2.5 per cent of the total, were declared invalid.

The Lien team has since mobilised supporters to force a recount and an independent investigation of the shooting.

In fact, most Taiwanese do not have sufficient faith in the polling process because all political parties, including the KMT, have a history of trying to rig the outcome.

While outright attempts at buying votes or stuffing the ballot boxes with dubious papers are said to have been reduced in recent years, attempts to manipulate the conduct of elections have remained.

In the latest example, Mr Chen used his presidential authority to tie the so-called defensive referendum on the deployment of missiles to the presidential poll.

On the strength of members appointed by the DPP, the election commission even held at one point that votes for the presidential election which were accidentally placed in ballot boxes for the referendum would also be counted.

The commission chairman, who is an old hand, had to reconvene a meeting, while some of the pro-DPP members were overseas, to reverse the ruling, which would have certainly caused even more confusion in the counting process had it been allowed to stand. That the chairman had to resort to questionable tactics to overturn a problematic decision said a lot about political manipulation of the electoral process.

As the protest by KMT supporters outside the presidential office in Taipei drags on, the courts have rejected the party's bid to declare last Saturday's poll invalid on the grounds that the election commission has not formally announced the outcome of the election.

This is because by law, the commission is not due to make such an announcement until seven days after polling day, even though it had already told the world last Saturday, about six hours after polls were closed, that Mr Chen's team had got more votes than Mr Lien's.

In the ensuing chaos sparked by Mr Lien's call for a recount, there were apparently no procedures for the commission to store the ballots under seal after they were counted. That had to be done by court officials the next day - a Sunday - by special arrangement after Mr Lien filed a suit. All these have shown up glaring holes in the electoral laws. The flaws would not have seemed so damaging had there been bi-partisan trust in the institutional integrity of the island's systems and a mutual respect for fair play.

Sadly, largely because of the legacy of the era of one-party rule by the KMT, which had used its executive authority to manipulate the systems in its favour when it was in power, that trust is lacking.

And what has transpired before and after the latest poll, which suggests that the DPP is just as manipulative, is not conducive to bringing that about.

Desperate to win, both parties' strategists do not seem to mind engaging in unscrupulous practices that are narrowly within the limits of the law.

As things stand, the KMT and the DPP are still locked in a zero-sum game that neither can afford to lose. Whether by executive or judicial order, a recount is almost certain to take place. The disconcerting prospect is that whether it is going to confirm Mr Chen as the winner or install Mr Lien as president, about half the island's population will not be pleased.

Yet again the SCMP hoists itself by its own petard. This kind of drivel is what passes for mature political discourse in this place. At least the SCMP continues in one vital service: it provides plenty of blog fodder.