KMT still hates referenda

No surprise here...
The government will not follow the previous administration’s strategy of using the name “Taiwan” to apply to join the UN, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday....

In tandem with this March’s presidential race, the pan-blue camp pitched a referendum asking voters to support a bid to “return” to the UN or any other international organization using a “pragmatic” and “flexible” title.

A pan-green backed UN referendum asked voters to support an application for UN membership under the name “Taiwan.”

Both proposals failed to reach the necessary threshold to be valid.

“As a result of the failure of the referendums, we cannot use the word ‘return’ or ‘join’ in our UN entry strategy this year,” said Chen, adding that the administration had not yet decided on whether to use “Chinese Taipei” in its bid as suggested by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during his campaign.

OK, this is clever of the blue camp but total B.S. The referendums were not rejected in any legal sense; there was not a "no" vote that resulted in the failure of either of them. Instead they simply didn't reach the absurdly high voter threshold and were invalid. That does not mean the government can't try to use "return" or "join" this year; neither did the failure to pass the 2004 referendum meant Taiwan could not buy missiles from the US, as the KMT then claimed.

So the KMT is displaying their tactic of dealing with referendums. You can't get people to vote "no" on it, so boycott it, split up the ballot stations, and call it "manipulative electoral strategy" instead of "empowering the people" even when you're pushing your own referendum. When less than half of all eligible voters pick up a ballot, call it a rejection to make the result sound more legally binding than it is.