Overseas Taiwanese Return Home to Vote

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 24, 2008 — -- An estimated 250,000 Taiwanese expatriates returned to Taiwan, Saturday, to choose their next president.

Nationalist (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former mayor of Taipei, handily defeated Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Frank Chang-ting Hsieh by approximately 17 percent.

Unlike the United States, Taiwan does not permit absentee voting. All votes must be cast inside the country. To participate in the elections, voters must be at least 20 years old and hold a Taiwan passport.

The flood of overseas Taiwanese back to the island is a tradition that was first popularized in 1996 for Taiwan's first democratic presidential election.

Overseas Taiwanese voters are known to be an important and boisterous voice for Taiwan.

Kuo Yun-Kuang, head of the KMT's Department of Overseas Affairs, estimated that as many as 50,000 pro-Ma Taiwanese returned to the country from the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan to vote. He said that many more who live in mainland China also came home to the island nation for the election.

Other estimates of the number of expatriates who made the trip back to their homeland for the election are much higher.

DPP officials expected a similar number of overseas voters to support Hsieh. Officials from Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area of California estimated about 5,000 Taiwanese traveled from each metropolis.

Ma's daughters, Ma Wei-chung and Ma Yuan-chung, were among the thousands of overseas Taiwanese voters to return from the United States.

Many overseas voters made plans well in advance to cast their vote in Taiwan. Travel agencies around the world took advantage of this tradition and offered "democracy seats" direct to Taipei.

Taiwan's China Airlines -- not to be confused with Beijing's Air China -- posted special round-trip tickets for $888, a play on the lucky nature of the number eight.

Mobilizing large groups from the United States and elsewhere, overseas voters hoped to make a splash in the presidential contest.

Alan Sun, the chairman of the returning Taiwanese of the U.S.-Taiwan Ma Ying-jeou Support Organization, organized a group from Los Angeles to support Ma.

His 24-year-old daughter arrived the day of the election to vote in her first Taiwanese election. He estimated that 5,000 Taiwanese-Americans from Los Angeles had returned for this election.