Taiwan Presidential Election Voting Ends... Early Counting Shows Tsai Ing-wen Leading

[Asia Economy Reporter Dongwoo Lee] The vote to elect Taiwan's next president concluded on the 11th.

The voting, which began at 8 a.m. at 17,226 polling stations across Taiwan, ended at 4 p.m. (local time). Ballots are being gathered at 368 counting centers nationwide, with some centers currently in the process of counting votes.

According to Taiwan CTV, in the early stages of counting, incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Tsai Ing-wen is leading Han Kuo-yu, the Kuomintang (KMT) candidate and mayor of Kaohsiung.

As of 4:20 p.m., President Tsai has received 186,433 votes (57.6%), while Mayor Han has 124,521 votes (38.5%). The electronic counting results are transmitted to the Central Election Commission for real-time aggregation.

Earlier, the Taiwan Election Commission predicted that the tally would be completed by 10 p.m. local time (11 p.m. Korean time), allowing election results to be announced.

In Taiwan, the prevailing expectation is that President Tsai will secure re-election. Various opinion polls released until last month, when public polling was permitted, showed President Tsai comfortably ahead of Kuomintang candidate Han Kuo-yu.

In a poll conducted by the Institute for National Stability on the 27th and 28th of last month, President Tsai's approval rating was 54.9%, more than 30 percentage points higher than Mayor Han's 22.1%.

Meanwhile, both the DPP and KMT are confidently claiming victory and are preparing large outdoor events to celebrate election wins at their respective campaign headquarters in Taipei and Kaohsiung.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.