Speaking to reporters at a lunar new year tea party Feb. 3, Interior Minister Jiang Yi-huah said the MOI planned to introduce absentee balloting for the upcoming presidential and national legislative elections in 2012 and, pending passage of revisions to the Election and Recall Law, may allow citizens to change their registered voting location from the site of their household registration to their place of work for the year-end mayoral polls.

The interior minister said declared that absentee voting would be "a major milestone to expand citizen participation" comparable to the introduction of full legislative and direct presidential elections and national citizen referendum.

Many citizens may have been surprised that the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which was the prime force behind the afore-mentioned democratic reforms, warned that the rash introduction of such a major changes in voting systems without a social consensus would cause "unfairness in elections" and could even "trigger a huge public backlash" given suspicions over the KMT's motivations.

In response to these objections, Jiang called on the DPP not to "slander absentee voting" or threaten "bloody conflict" and to refrain from "using ideology to control all public policies."

However, the matter at hand does not merely concern the right to vote in the abstract but concrete, complex and critical problems that involve the substantive rights of our citizens to participate in regular and free, open and fair elections with secret voting and in which every vote counts and that could impinge on the integrity of Taiwan's democratic system.

The first question that should be addressed is why Taiwan does not have absentee, correspondence or even internet voting and why citizens must vote at their place of household registration and all ballots must pulled from ballot boxes by hand, examined for validity, shouted and tallied by hand and physically monitored by representatives of all parties.

The answer is directly related to the sordid history of ballot stuffing and other methods of vote fixing under the KMT during its authoritarian period and the resulting insistence through direct citizen action by Taiwan democratic activists for visual monitoring of votes to make sure that each ballot is cast in secret and is counted and counts.

Moreover, while implementing absentee voting is in accord with the guarantee of citizens to vote under Article 130 of the Republic of China Constitution, the concerns raised by the DPP over the numerous "technical" problems are perfectly legitimate given the requirement of Article 129 that all elections are to be carried out "by universal, equal and direct suffrage and by secret ballot."

Especially troubling are the daunting technical and political problems concerning possible absentee voting by citizens living in the authoritarian People's Republic of China, a question that merits separate treatment and which Jiang indicated was not on the KMT's agenda "at present."

Indeed, only if voting is secret can citizens cast their ballots sincerely and freely without fear of intimidation or retaliation and only if all votes cast by citizens in a clearly defined political community are fairly and transparently counted can each citizen know that his or her voice "counts."

Sunrise clause needed

Resolution of these "devils in the details" is doubly daunting given the lack of public confidence in the political neutrality of government services, including the postal service, especially as numerous actions by the current KMT government show that its "party-state" mentality remains intact and leaves open to doubt whether the KMT can resist the "moral hazard" of being able to exercise control over thousands or tens of thousands of correspondence ballots.

Moreover, the issue of the motivation for the KMT's rush to change the voting game rules cannot be swept under the table, especially since Jiang's announcement came on the heels of KMT setbacks in mayoral elections in December and a sweep of three legislative by-elections by the DPP in early January and the plunge of Ma's approval ratings to well below 30 percent.

If the Ma government was sincere about implementing democratic principles, then it should be willing to first form a multipartisan commission to study and debate possible improvements of our voting systems and formulate workable and credible solutions to the political and technical problems.

Moreover, the Ma government should agree that any major changes in our national voting systems require a multipartisan consensus and a "sunrise" clause to ensure that such alternations cannot be used directly by current power-holders.

Our citizens may bear differing costs in exercising their right to vote in Taiwan at their place of household registration, but this requirement protects their right to cast ballots in secret based on their conscience in polls whose results will reflect the collective will of the actual residents of democratic Taiwan.

We should not lightly change these rules.