Report on the 1998 Legislative Council Elections
The Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) is confident of claiming that it has successfully maintained its independent, apolitical, impartial and neutral status in conducting and supervising the 1998 Legislative Council elections.
The Commission Chairman, Mr Justice Woo Kwok-hing, made the remarks at a press conference on September 16, 1998 to explain a package of recommendations for improvements to electoral arrangements in the future.
"The Commission has always been acting and making its decisions absolutely independently, and needless to say, no one has ever influenced the Commission in an improper way," he said.
In a report submitted to the Chief Executive, the EAC reviewed various aspects of electoral arrangements and procedures, taking into consideration feedback from candidates, returning officers, polling and counting staff as well as complainants.
Procedures that have proved to work well will be retained in future elections. Examples are:
The counting arrangements adopted on May 24;
The allocation of an alternative polling station for electors affected by inclement weather will form part of the contingency plans; and
The opening of polling stations for public visit before the polling day.
In a wide range of areas such as voter registration, election-related guidelines, the allocation of polling stations, the design of ballot papers and introductory leaflets, and polling and counting arrangements, a number of improvement measures are recommended as follows:
In response to growing public concern over the protection of privacy of personal data, consideration will be given as to whether the identity card number of electors can be struck off from the published registers or extracts of the registers given to candidates for electioneering;
Voter registration forms will be revised to ask electors to indicate their language preference in communications. Electors who have already been registered are requested to inform the Registration and Electoral Office of their choice;
A comprehensive review of the method of allocation of polling stations will be conducted for the sake of convenience to electors. The review will take into consideration the experience gained in the 1998 elections, developments in various areas and inputs from District Officers;
Introductory leaflets may be printed in full colour to enable candidates to include party logos and colour pictures or illustrations in their messages;
Considering allowing the names and logos of political parties to be printed on ballot papers in the next Legislative Council election in 2000;
An index will be added to the guidelines on election-related activities to make reading easier for candidates, their agents and returning officers;
To address the problem of the mailing of oversized election advertisements, the EAC will consider revising the regulations and guidelines to stipulate clearer specifications;
In view of incidents where mutual aid committees (MACs) in public housing estates allowed certain candidates to use their offices for electioneering, the guidelines should be reviewed to apply the "equal treatment" principle to offices of MACs and owners corporations;
Given the large number of complaints of noise nuisance generated from loudspeakers used for electioneering, the EAC will consider stipulating in the guidelines a time restriction for using loudhailers on top of requirements under the Noise Control Ordinance;
More contractors will be hired to handle the bulk of poll cards and election materials to ensure that they reach electors as early as possible before the polling day;
Reducing the number of display spots to be allocated to candidates of functional constituencies, the Election Committee (EC) and the EC subsectors given the low utilisation;
Training for voter registration staff, and polling and hotline staff to be stepped up;
Consideration should be given to arranging two shifts of counting staff and spelling out clearly their duties in their terms of employment; and
On the basis of the experience gained from the EC election, the EAC will continue to study the viability of computer linkage of electorate data with a view to simplifying polling and counting arrangements in the long run.
Mr Justice Woo said that the enthusiasm of a majority of the electors to participate in the poll had made the election a matter of pride or great meaning for Hong Kong citizens, especially in view of the poor weather on polling day.
A record 1,489,705 electors cast their votes, resulting in an unprecedented turnout rate of 53.29 per cent. Other record-breaking events were: the largest number of electors ever - 2.8 million - were registered and the largest number of 166 candidates were validly nominated and a record 156 of them contested the election.
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