Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華), a former Nantou City mayor, claimed victory in the Nantou County magistrate election on Saturday, keeping the seat firmly in the control of her party, which has held it since 2005.
While the vote count was still ongoing, the initial results showed Hsu leading the other two contenders, Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and independent Wang Yung-ching (王永慶).
When delivering her victory speech, Hsu said her team will stand with the agriculture and travel industries of Nantou to better the lives of the county’s residents through advancing Nantou’s tourism industry.
Hsu declared victory around 7:15 p.m, while her main opponent Tsai conceded defeat around the same time.
Hsu finished with 154,256 votes, or 55.99 percent of the total, with her primary opponent Tsai receiving 117,993 votes, or 42.83 percent, according to figures from the Central Election Commission (CEC).
Tsai officially resigned from her position as head of the Cabinet’s central Taiwan center on March 29 to run in the race after winning her party’s primary in the county.
Tsai was a legislator-at-large for the DPP from 2016 to 2020, but then lost in the 2020 legislative elections in Nantou County’s first electoral district to Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) of the KMT.
Hsu will succeed Nantou Magistrate Lin Ming-chen (林明溱) of the KMT, who was elected in 2014 and had served the maximum two terms in a county that has been in the KMT’s hands for decades, except for the period 1997-2005.
A former mayor of Nantou City (2006-2014), Hsu also served as a lawmaker, representing Nantou for six years in the Legislature, after she won a by-election in 2015 and two subsequent legislative elections.
Her first entry to an elected position in Nantou County was in 2002, when she was voted in as a city councilor on the People First Party ticket.
During her campaign this year for the county magistracy, Hsu was subjected to scrutiny on her master’s degree thesis, as well as her family’s background, as a hunt rippled throughout the 2022 election campaign after one candidate was derailed on accusations of plagiarism.
The candidate, former Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), who was the DPP’s Taoyuan mayoral candidate, eventually withdrew from Taoyuan’s mayoral race after National Taiwan University investigated the allegations and concluded that he had plagiarized another person’s work in his master’s degree thesis.
As plagiarism allegations began spreading to candidates in other parts of the country, Hsu also got caught in the wave, and her master’s thesis that she had submitted at Taichung’s Feng Chia University in 2009 came under scrutiny amid allegations that it was similar to a report written by a subordinate of hers the same year.
While those allegations were eventually laid to rest, Hsu also came under fire for her father’s alleged ties to Taiwan’s underworld.
Nantou voters, however, appeared unfazed by the allegations on Saturday.
Local residents told CNA before the elections that her political experience and two decades of service in various local government positions in the county had weighed heavily in her favor.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel