Taiwan air force keeps a reservist call-up on election day, telling 311 to vote before reporting

Taiwan's air force will go ahead with a reserve training call-up for 311 members of an Air Force guard battalion that begins on 28 November, the day of the island's local elections, and has told the reservists they may vote first and report as late as 8 pm, the Central News Agency reported on Friday. The clash came to light after Kuomintang legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin raised it on social media earlier that day.

According to Hsu, the reservists were due to report to the Taipei City alternative service training centre at the Shuiyuan camp. She said the All-out Defense Mobilization Agency had told her the call-up dates were fixed before the election date was announced, and that the agency was phoning each of the 311 reservists to explain that the rules allow a later report time when the first day of training falls on an election day.

The air force gave the news agency a fuller account. Its Air Force Operations Command had originally scheduled the training for the 12th Guard Battalion from 5 to 18 September at Songshan Air Base in Taipei, but the barracks there were being rebuilt and could not be used to house the reservists. The command instead borrowed an available slot at the city government's alternative service training centre, moved the training to 28 November through 11 December, and published that schedule in May.

The Central Election Commission announced on 20 August that elections for city mayors and county magistrates would be held on 28 November. The air force said it then checked its training calendar and found four units whose call-ups overlapped with the vote. To protect the reservists' right to vote, it rescheduled three of them: the 2nd and 3rd Mobile Radar Detachments and the 13th Guard Battalion.

The 12th Guard Battalion's session could not be brought forward because of the limits on available venues, so the air force kept the original dates and is relying on the late-reporting rule for election day. The service said the operations command had been contacting every reservist in the unit since 8 September and that only 32 still needed follow-up. The rest had been told about their voting rights, the reporting time and how a late arrival would be handled.

Hsu argued that the error pointed to a wider strain on the armed forces. She asked whether the lapse reflected incomplete staff planning or a training and duty load heavy enough to leave frontline personnel overstretched. She said the military continued to lose personnel and faced pressure on recruitment and retention, while its exercises and routine duties had not been reduced to match.

She also urged senior commanders to examine a recent run of self-harm cases among service members, while saying that each case had its own causes and could not simply be blamed on workload. She called on Defence Minister Wellington Koo to carry out the amended military pay law passed by the legislature last year, to improve leave for troops, and to review mobilisation planning and the way the ministry tracks information from other government agencies.

Under the current plan, the battalion's reservists will report on election evening and train until 11 December. The air force has not said whether it will change how it checks future call-up schedules against the election calendar.