By Lin Hsin-han, Liu Wan-lin and Esme Yeh / Staff reporters, with staff writer

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would support the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) in promoting amendments to the Referendum Act (公民投票法) in the next legislative session, KMT caucus secretary-general Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) said yesterday, after the opposition-supported nuclear power referendum failed to meet the threshold to pass.

Although 4.34 million people (21.7 percent of eligible voters) voted "yes," while 1.51 million (7.5 percent) voted "no" in Saturday's referendum to restart the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant, it failed to meet the threshold of affirmative votes from at least 25 percent of eligible voters, or 5,000,523. Voter turnout was 29.53 percent.

TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) on Saturday night said the TPP would seek to revise the act to bind referendums to national elections, with the goal of garnering more votes in referendums.

Referendums used to be held along with national elections until the act was amended in 2017 to lower the threshold for initiating and passing referendums. That led to numerous referendum initiatives in 2018, resulting in long waits at polling stations and extra work for election staff.

The following year, the legislature -- which at the time was led by a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) majority -- passed an amendment requiring referendums to be held biennially on the fourth Saturday of August, separate from presidential and legislative elections.

Huang said the DPP put referendums in a "birdcage."

The key provisions of the TPP's proposal would allow referendums to be held alongside national elections instead of biennially in the summer to make people more willing to vote, he said.

Despite failing to reach the threshold, the more than 4.3 million "yes" votes in Saturday's referendum showed that the DPP must review its energy policy, he said.

A 2018 referendum to abolish a policy on phasing out nuclear energy by this year passed with 59.49 percent of participating voters casting ballots in favor of the measure, while on Saturday, 74.17 percent of participating voters supported the referendum, Huang said.

The result showed that using nuclear power has become a mainstream opinion in Taiwan, Huang said.

Wang said that last week's referendum was only 650,000 votes short of meeting the one-quarter threshold.

That reflected Taiwanese public opinion, she said.

Given that the KMT has proposed related bills in previous legislative sessions, the party would support the TPP in proposing amendments to bind referendums to national elections, she said.

That would make referendums less prone to failure due to political maneuvering, she said.

KMT to back TPP efforts to change Referendum Act - Taipei Times