The Kaohsiung High Court imposed heavier prison sentences on two men on Tuesday for vote buying in the 2006 Kaohsiung mayoral election.

Ku Hsing-ming received three years and six months in jail, while Tsai Neng-hsiang was sentenced to nine months for influencing members of the public to vote for Kuomintang candidate Huang Chun-ying. Ku also loses his civil rights for three years, Tsai for one year.

The Kaohsiung District Court originally found the two men not guilty, but the High Court imposed prison sentences of three years and four months for Ku and Tsai respectively.

Tuesday’s tougher verdicts came after the Supreme Court overturned the second verdict and ordered the High Court to reconsider.

The court said that Ku spent NT$46,000 of his own money to charter two buses to carry members of the public to Huang’s final campaign rally, on December 8, 2006. After the event, Ku and Tsai handed out NT$500 to each passenger on the buses.

The passengers were not “obvious” KMT supporters, and the money they received far exceeded the costs of food during the trip, the court ruled. The amount of the payments, the place and the time all showed that was a case of vote buying, the court concluded.

The Democratic Progressive Party publicized the case at a news conference on election day despite the ban on campaigning during that period, running ads in the media saying it had evidence of vote buying on the buses. The KMT accused the DPP of trying to manipulate the election in its favor by spreading false rumors at the last minute, when it was too late to come up with counterevidence.

In the end, Huang lost the election to Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Chu by a slim margin. In 2002, he also lost to incumbent DPP mayor Frank Hsieh. Huang, a former vice mayor of Taiwan’s second city, is now a member of the Examination Yuan.