The Taiwan vote is in. And there are fascinating parallels to our 2000 elections here: First the NYT writes:
The presidential candidate of the opposition Nationalist Party refused on Saturday night to accept results showing that he narrowly lost an election to President Chen Shui-bian...
But there are some notable differeneces to our upcoming 2004 election.:
...and (they) demanded that ballot boxes from all 13,000 polling places nationwide be impounded and recounted. 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.
We won't be able to do this with our electronic voting machines which have no paper ballots in our upcomiing election trainwreck.
Similar to us in 2000 and undoubtably in 2004, the election is unbelievably close:
The Central Election Commission declared that President Chen had 29,518 more votes than Mr. Lien out of 13.25 million ballots cast.
There even appears to be a Nader-like protest movement which had a dedcisive effect:
The commission declared 337,297 ballots to be invalid more than 11 times President Chen's apparent margin of victory. 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.
And there's a new twist, the possibility of a faked assasination attempt right before the election to get a sympathy bounce in the vote. Current evidence, suggests this may reallyl have happened. Guys, please don't try this at home.