Protest of Taiwan's presidential election
The presidential candidate of the opposition Nationalist Party [of Taiwan] refused on Saturday night to accept results showing that he narrowly lost an election to President Chen Shui-bian, and demanded that ballot boxes from all 13,000 polling places nationwide be impounded and recounted.
"This is an unfair election with a lot of question marks," Lien Chan, the Nationalist Party candidate, told a huge crowd of supporters, while appealing for calm. ...
The Central Election Commission declared that President Chen had 29,518 more votes than Mr. Lien out of 13.25 million ballots cast. But Mr. Lien called for the election's annulment an hour before the commission finished its count, and the commission did not actually declare a winner.
The commission declared 337,297 ballots to be invalid more than 11 times President Chen's apparent margin of victory. In a development echoing the controversy four years ago over the vote count in Florida, there was uncertainty tonight over whether polling places had followed consistent standards in declaring votes to be invalid.
A coalition of non-profit groups had called on voters to file invalid ballots, contending that the main political parties were too interested in relations with China and the concerns of the affluent, and had not paid enough attention to the plight of the poor and the disabled.
Voters in Taiwan are given a paper ballot, a stamp and an ink pad, and asked to mark the candidate they prefer. The ballots are counted by hand. -- Taiwan's President Appears to Win Election (nytimes.com)