The Election Committee subsector elections held on 19 September, 2021 was a far cry from the 2016 polls, in terms of size of the electorate, with a 97 per cent drop in registered voters.
By Pak Hei Leung & Christopher James Lee
Under the new electoral framework imposed by the National People’s Congress (NPC), the 2021 Election Committee subsector ordinary elections saw a 97 per cent decrease in registered voters.
A total of 7,891 voters registered for the 2021 Election Committee election, among whom only 4,889 had to vote, since the rest of the subsectors were uncontested. There were 246,440 registered voters in the last election held in 2016. A total of 412 candidates contest 364 out of the 1,500 seat.
Electoral Affairs Commission chairman Barnabas Fung Wah apologized for the delay in the announcement of results and admitted the process of vote counting was “unsatisfactory”. Fung expected all results to be announced at around 8am the next day. It took almost 14 hours to finish counting 4,380 votes.
He explained that the problem lied with ballot verification papers – there were human errors with the frontline staff, causing discrepancies on the fill-in ballot paper account.
Edited by Mandy YIM