UDN intern lies about vote-buying

Maddog blogs on a dirty tricks....

The Hsuan Chuang University student posted messages on the SocialForce.org discussion board saying that he and his neighbors had personally received payment of NT$1,700 (US$52.62) as an incentive to vote for the DPP's mayoral candidate in Taipei, Frank Hsieh. Others participating in the discussion expressed doubt, but Chiu pretended to be someone who "had originally planned to vote for Hsieh" but said that he was dismayed because "buying votes was just what the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) used to do." The as yet unidentified Chiu insisted that his story was true and that he had personally received the money. Someone passed the information along to Hsieh's campaign office which, in turn, contacted the police.

The kicker is that the culprit was an intern for the paper UDN. The timing is suggestive...last minute dirty tricks are a staple of the KMT bag -- recall the video of Su Tseng-chang's "vote-buying" that came out a couple of days before the elections last year, with no clear source or participants....of course, if things had worked out, the paper probably would have run a story on the "vote buying."

[Taiwan]