Missing millions and hard numbers - TW

[dArKeR]

By Jerome Keating

Wednesday, Jun 02, 2004,Page 8


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Millions are missing, yet no one is concerned. Millions are missing, yet no one accepts responsibility. Millions are missing, yet all seem in denial. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP) continue to ignore their missing millions and focus only on 30,000.

Millions of dollars? No, we're not referring to the missing millions of KMT money, though lower-ranking party members should be concerned with who has been able to buy what, where and why.

The millions we refer to are votes -- the hard and fast tickets needed to win elections.

Numbers can be boring but they carry a truth. Percentages are deceptive; numbers don't lie. If only three people vote and I get two of those votes, to say I got 66 percent of the votes is better than saying I got two. So bear with this examination of numbers from the presidential elections of 1996, 2000 and 2004; they are crucial to the questions of accountability, subsequent denial and pathology.

Besides the admirably high percentage of voter turnout, simple arithmetic shows an increase of 2,148,303 votes cast between 1996 and 2004 (see Table 1). Who benefited? The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did, but their numbers show an increase far greater than the increase in votes.

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