Taiwanese actress-turned-politician May Chin wears traditional aboriginal dress as she sings Taiwan's national anthem at a flag-raising ceremony in Taipei early January 1, 2002. Chin was elected as a legislator in the December parliamentary elections. REUTERS/Simon Kwong 

Black stands for corruption; gold means money! Flagrant vote buying and unscrupulous politicians awash in cash have long plagued elections in Taiwan. Nonetheless, President Chen and his government are actively seeking to eliminate that scourge, and many "watchers" we talked with even called this election perhaps the "cleanest" ever.

Despite clear progress on vote-buying and corruption at the political party level, one cannot say as much progress has been made on the electoral system by which Taiwanese vote. That system is called the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) with multiple-seat districts. Even the name sounds confusing. It also breeds corruption and confusion and remains a hurdle to voters and analysts, who say it curbs democratic transparency. Understandably the Taiwanese parties and the government even now are seeking to replace the existing, nearly incomprehensible electoral system borrowed from the Japanese--who have abandoned it--with a system of balloting more transparent and more democratic. This imminent change of the electoral system is one of the signal stories coming out of the December 1 parliamentary elections.

Keep in mind that in the United States we use a single-member, plurality system. It's utterly simple. Each voter casts one vote for one candidate in each race listed on the ballot. The candidate with the largest vote (plurality) in each race in each district wins. Our system tries to assure clear winners, but it harshly penalizes single issue or small-party candidates. For illustration, of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, only 3 are not either a Republican or Democrat.

Compare that system to SNTV where each Taiwanese voter also gets one vote, but several legislators are elected from each multi-member district. Out of 225 total seats, 176 candidates are directly elected, and 8 of those are reserved for aboriginal representatives, who may be voted for only by Aborigines. Also in the Legislative Yuan (parliament) there are an additional 41 legislators-at-large, and 8 overseas representatives who are elected proportionally. The overseas representatives, however, do not come from overseas. They just represent that group. And there are a specified number of women representatives as well. 

The SNTV system gets still more obtuse because voters are asked by their parties to vote for specific candidates, when there may be perhaps 2 to 5 members from the same party on a single ballot. Permit me to give a somewhat cumbersome example. If candidates A, B and C all come from the same party, and voters from that party all vote for A, rather than giving B and C votes, too, candidate A will win by a landslide, but candidates B and C may not be elected at all. Conversely, if all three candidates had been give an approximately equal number of votes, A, B, and C all from the same party could have won over the other parties' candidates. In effect, on these multi-member, proportional ballots, candidates from the same party run against one another, as well as against other parties' candidates. 

To mitigate this problem, candidates are given a number on the ballot. A party then will ask some of its voters to vote for candidate A, some to vote for candidate B, and so on. Sometimes to select a candidate voters are asked to use their own birth dates, (everyone born between January and April votes for candidate A, May through August, candidate B, etc.) rather than using numbers, which may be more easily forgot. If the reader is confused, so was I. Apparently, so are the voters. The upshot of all this is that voting all too often becomes focused almost exclusively on a candidate personally, rather than on issues, and corruption-prone, hence the "black and gold" connection.

What to do? Most Taiwanese seem to agree SNTV needs to go. They have not agreed on a replacement system, however. At the moment, the odds-on-favorite might look like the German electoral system called the 2-list system. In that system, a voter votes once for an individual candidate (on the first list)--half the seats in the legislature--and once for a party (on the second list), the other half of the legislative seats. Each party receives the total number of seats in the legislature, which corresponds (or is proportional) to the percentage of votes received on the second list. The individuals elected on the first list are then subtracted from the total number of seats awarded on the second list, and the party selects candidates to fill the remainder of its allotted seats. 

This system is really a combination of the U.S. single-member voting (the first list) and the traditional European system of proportional voting (the second list). It has the advantage of encouraging diversity of parties and opinions (the multi-member-proportional system), which is very democratic, while not letting small parties and diversity of candidates get out of hand (the single-member plurality system), which enhances stability. In short, the German electoral system is rather like a "Push-Me, Pull-You," that wonderful animal with a head on both ends Henry Higgins applauds in "My Fair Lady."

Anyone who has played a team sport will know that even beyond an individual player's talent and grit, rules of the game determine the final outcome. Taiwan right now is in the process literally of replacing the rules by which it governs the game of politics and policy-making. These are momentous changes, and they will have far-reaching and democratic consequences.