Taiwan's Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairman Michael You (游盈隆) has been in office for barely two months. That was long enough for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Yi-chuan (王義川) to brand him "the worst chairman in history."
You hit back hard, saying he was "deeply puzzled, deeply pained, and deeply regretful" over the attack. On all three counts, the record is on his side.
Taiwan's Former CEC Chairs Set The Bar For Failure
Start with the puzzlement. Whatever one makes of You's brief tenure, the title Wang wants to hang on him is already taken—twice over.
In 2018, then-Chairman Chen In-chin (陳英鈐) presided over a ten-referendum, nine-in-one election day so chaotic that voters in Taipei were still casting ballots while counting had begun elsewhere in the city. He resigned within 48 hours.
His successor, Lee Chin-yung (李進勇), attended a DPP campaign event for a Keelung mayoral candidate while chairing a body legally required to stand above party politics. He also oversaw a mass recall process widely accused of favoring the ruling party—recalls targeting DPP politicians faced far stricter scrutiny than those against the opposition Kuomintang (KMT).
Whether You will prove a good chairman remains an open question. But setting a "worst in history" record in sixty days, against that competition, is a mathematical impossibility.
DPP Rule Made CEC Independence Look Like Betrayal
The pain is easier to decode than it first appears. You is a former DPP member, and being shelled by an old comrade stings.
But in Taiwan's scorched-earth party politics, a former ally who no longer takes orders is simply reclassified as an enemy. After a decade in power, the DPP grew comfortable with independent agency heads who were independent in name only.
A chairman who takes "administering elections above party lines" literally was always going to be treated as a heretic.
What should genuinely pain You is not the hostility itself. As a political scientist who has spent his career studying how parties behave, he knows parties fight. What stings is the sheer strategic incompetence of this particular attack.
Consider what Wang was actually attacking. You's alleged offense was telling local election officials, during inspection visits, that combining referendums with the year-end elections was a "trend" they should prepare for. Speaking before any proposal had been formally reviewed was arguably careless.
But the Referendum Act has already been amended to restore referendum-election combinations. The KMT and Taiwan People's Party (TPP), which together control the Legislative Yuan, have openly vowed to submit proposals before the statutory deadline. At least one has already been fast-tracked to a second reading.
Under those circumstances, telling election workers to brace for a heavy workload is no different from a prosecutor-general touring regional offices to warn about vote-buying before any indictment exists. As You put it: what exactly was the error?
CEC Referendum Review Covers Procedure, Not Policy Substance
There is a fairer criticism available, though Wang did not make it. You's "reminder" telegraphed how the commission is likely to rule.
A CEC commissioner nominee struck the same note during legislative confirmation hearings, voicing agreement in principle with the legislature's referendum proposals before any formal review. And at his April handover ceremony, You told reporters the commission's default should be to approve legislature-initiated referendums, with rejection the exception, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency.
Legally, that posture is largely correct. The standalone Referendum Review Commission was abolished years ago, and its powers were folded into the CEC.
Since then, the commission's review has been procedural, not substantive. It checks whether a proposal's text meets statutory form and whether signatures clear the threshold—not whether the policy is a good idea.
Proposals adopted by a full vote of the Legislative Yuan leave even less room for second-guessing. The CEC is an election administrator, not the legislature's supervisor.
But the doctrine collides with the commission's own recent record. Last year, the CEC rejected a KMT-initiated, legislature-approved referendum against abolishing the death penalty. Its reasoning: Taiwan has not in fact abolished it, so there was nothing to "oppose."
That logic is not frivolous. Capital punishment remains on the books.
What changed is a Constitutional Court ruling requiring unanimous death verdicts across all three court levels before a sentence can be carried out. Critics say the justices invented that standard, and it sits far from majority public opinion.
For those who see the court as having quietly nullified a law it declined to strike down, a referendum looks like the only remedy left. Would the new commission overturn its predecessor's rejection?
Behind that lies a deeper question: can a referendum override a constitutional ruling at all, when such rulings can now issue from as few as three justices? That collision may become the defining referendum controversy of the coming years.
A Caning Referendum Would Embarrass Taiwan Internationally
Not every proposal in the pipeline deserves equal seriousness. KMT headquarters has made restarting nuclear power its priority referendum topic. Whatever one thinks of the answer, that is at least a real policy question.
The same cannot be said of a proposal from KMT legislators to introduce caning as a criminal punishment. For a twenty-first-century democracy, merely placing corporal punishment on a national ballot—never mind passing it—would make Taiwan a global human-rights headline of precisely the wrong kind.
Even the nuclear question is weaker than it looks as referendum material. The Electricity Act was amended back in 2025 to delete the statutory non-nuclear deadline.
The phase-out itself happened because the Tsai administration failed to foresee the electricity surge from artificial intelligence and advanced chipmaking. President Lai Ching-te's (賴清德) government has already begun evaluating license extensions for the Kuosheng and Maanshan plants.
When policy is already moving through ordinary executive and legislative channels, what exactly is the referendum for?
Most Referendum Proposals Need Legislation, Not Ballots
That question hangs over nearly the whole slate.
Take the TPP's signature proposal: earmarking traffic-fine revenue for transportation infrastructure. It is a legitimate governance idea—but one that could be accomplished by statute, by administrative regulation, or by a rider attached to the annual budget review. Putting it to a national vote is using a meat cleaver to peel an egg.
Absentee and transferred voting, another KMT-TPP favorite, could be enacted tomorrow by the same legislative majority now demanding a referendum on it.
Which raises the obvious suspicion: are these proposals meant to settle policy, or to manufacture mobilization ahead of the November 28 local elections?
You could not resist weighing in on volume. He told legislators that one referendum alongside the elections is "just right," two is "a bit much," and three is "unbearable."
That was more commentary than a chairman strictly needed to offer—the CEC has, after all, survived administering ten referendums on a single election day. But the anxiety underneath it is institutional, not partisan: a plea that lawmakers stop treating the referendum, a serious instrument of direct democracy, as a campaign prop.
The DPP Attack Strengthened CEC Independence Instead
Nearly three decades ago, You edited a scholarly volume whose title translates as *Democratic Consolidation or Collapse: Taiwan's Challenges in the Twenty-First Century*. He surely never expected the challenge to land, quite so literally, on his own desk.
He plainly does not intend to let it become the regret of a career spent between the academy and politics.
Wang and his fellow travelers, meanwhile, kicked an iron plate. Their broadside crossed the floor of common-sense politics, and its only lasting achievement points the other way.
By attacking a chairman for showing no partisan deference, the DPP has reinforced the public impression that You actually has none. An election commission whose credibility had been battered nearly to collapse is, thanks to its loudest critics, being consolidated again.
Call it a blessing delivered by insult—one You never asked for, but will gladly keep. （Related： Michael You vs. The Cabinet: The Constitutional Showdown Over Mainland Spouses ｜ Latest ）
