[Text/Observer Network Columnist Gan Wenfeng]
One
The 7th District Council Election in Hong Kong has finally come to an end!
As a participant in this election, there is a feeling of accomplishing a historical task after completing the election. Since the implementation of the National Security Law, all major elections – namely the Election Committee election, the Chief Executive Election, the Legislative Council Election and the District Council Election – have been held once, and the dust has settled on the District Council elections, which can be regarded as completing a complete election cycle. In the end, all the important posts of governing Hong Kong were held by patriots, ensuring that the important principle of patriots administering Hong Kong was finally initially implemented in Hong Kong, so this district council election can also be said to be the final battle against the "black riots".
This election was also a challenge for me because the electoral system has changed and the whole game is completely new.
Taking direct election as an example, Hong Kong's more than 400 small constituencies have now been merged into 44 constituencies, each of which adopts a two-seat, single-vote system. If you participate in the direct election, the candidate would only need to focus on the promotion of a small district, but this time it will be 10 small constituencies.
The difference between this District Council election and the previous one is that in addition to the 88 seats in the direct election, there are also 176 seats in the District Council constituency election, referred to as "indirect election". In each of the 18 districts in Hong Kong, there are District Fight Crime Committees, District Fire Safety Committees (DHCs) and Area Committees, all of which are appointed by the Government and are composed of community leaders, school principals, IO chairmen of housing estates, representatives of community service organisations, etc. In other words, they are basically patriots recognized by the government, and they are also indirectly elected voters.
In this election, I participated in the indirect election, and in Tuen Mun District, where I lived, there were 161 members of the three committees. Contrary to this speculation, I think that the election under the new electoral system is more difficult than the election of the district council under the old electoral system.
Thank you for your votes after being elected (photo provided by the author)
Two
To participate in the elections, the first step is, of course, to get a nomination.
In the old system of elections, we needed to get voters from our neighbourhood, and we usually set up street stands on the street to gain the support of passers-by. The other is to serve a community for a long time, and to get acquainted with certain local voters, hoping that they will nominate us. Under the new electoral system, it is not easy to obtain nominations from three members of the Fight Crime, Fire Prevention and Area Committees respectively in order to participate in the election.
The members of the three councils live in various parts of Hong Kong, and there are privacy concerns involved, and the government will not disclose their contact details to those who want to run for election. This means that finding them and getting nominated requires long-term involvement in the region, attendance at events, meeting them and exchanging contact information.
Getting to know the nine members is not the most difficult, and it should not be forgotten that the members of the three councils are community leaders who are familiar with the districts, some of whom may have served in the community for decades, or even current or former district councillors, and it is much more difficult to win their nominations than to win the votes of the general electorate.
While ordinary voters may nominate you because they see you working hard in your community, the members of the three councils are more rigorous and they require you to have some knowledge of the different issues in your community. For example, if you go to the principal for a nomination, it is impossible not to understand the education issues in the district, right? If you go to the chairman of a housing estate incorporation, how can you not understand the difficulties in the management of housing estates? Therefore, it is by no means easy to obtain the nomination of the members of the three councils.
After obtaining the nomination, the members of the three sessions should be canvassed.
Even if you have been serving in the local community for a long time, it is not easy to get to know all the members of the three committees, so it is often necessary to get to know other members through the introduction of some members. However, it is important to understand that each committee member is a community leader or an industry leader, and they will seriously consider whether to help before introducing you to others, and other candidates who can get enough nominations also have a certain status and popularity in the community, so every vote in the indirect election is not easy to come by.
It is safe to say that although there are only about 100 voters in the indirect election, the time and effort spent in the process of winning votes with other candidates is by no means less than that of the direct election.
Three
Participating in the intermittent election is not all I have to do in this election.
I am a former District Councillor who has continued to serve the local community even though I lost the last election, and has survived the difficult four years since the outbreak of the pandemic. Because the number of directly elected constituencies in this election has increased a lot, it is basically impossible for all candidates to work in the entire constituency, so in addition to participating in indirect elections, I also have to canvass for the directly elected candidates of friendly parties in my own community.
This act of calling on one's supporters to vote for another candidate is called "passing votes", and as the name suggests, it is the transition of votes that belong to you to someone else.
Pull Mrs. Yip (Regina Ip) to her own constituency and canvass for the candidates of the Friends Party
Ticket crossing is not an easy process. People who have never operated before may think, "Wouldn't it be okay to ask your supporters to vote for another person and tell your supporters this information in different ways?" ”
It is important to understand that each voter has his own ideas, they are supporters, not puppets. They can vote for you for different reasons, not the same as someone who will vote for you. I don't rule out the possibility that some people will follow my advice, but more often they will pay attention to the people I support before deciding whether to follow my recommendation, and some of them will decide to vote for other candidates because I did not participate in the direct election, and some of them will even decide not to vote.
In addition to cooperating in the preparation of publicity materials, training one's own volunteers to understand the recommended candidates, and introducing their strengths and advantages in person with the recommended people in the district, there are many strategies and details, which will not be repeated here. In my personal experience, the workload of doing the ticket is comparable to fighting an election campaign myself.
Four
After running and canvassing, the most important part is ushered in - voting on election day.
Voting lasts 14 hours from 8:30 to 22:30 in direct elections and 6 hours from 8:30 to 14:30 in intermittent elections.
Most of the candidates who participated in the intermittent election that morning went to the entrance of the ballot station before 8 o'clock to prepare. Because many candidates have to return to their communities to canvass for direct elections, in Tuen Mun District, more than a dozen of our candidates for indirect elections have made a "gentlemen's agreement": everyone will leave the ballot station at 9:30, leaving only volunteers to continue canvassing. Therefore, I myself left the polling station of the indirect election very soon after casting my vote in the intermittent election.
Indirect voting
From morning to lunch, I went back to the neighborhood where I worked to do ticket work. The afternoon was arguably a time of low turnout, so I took advantage of this time to go back to where I live and cast my vote in the direct election.
Why are there two different polling stations? This is because in this DC polling, the polling stations for the direct election are arranged close to the registered residential addresses of the electors, while for the indirect elections, one polling station is set up in each of the 18 districts to cast votes for the voters of the three councils in the respective districts, which are generally located in the more central locations of the districts. Therefore, in order for all members of the three committees to cast two votes, they need to go to two different polling stations.
If you look back at the day of the poll, the biggest news must have been the failure of the ticketing system server, which caused the voting to be suspended for more than an hour during the evening rush hour.
At that time, all the polling stations in Hong Kong were closed, and we watched at the polling stations as voters cast their ballots after dinner with smiles on their faces, but they had no choice but to turn back because of this accident. 10, 20, 50...... Nearly 200 voters at one polling station alone were unable to vote due to systemic problems.
Some of them continued to work in the region for four years after losing the 2019 election in order to regain their seats in this election, and many voters wanted to vote for improving regional governance after the last brutal and unfair election.
At that time, we were standing outside the polling stations, hoping that the voters would come back to vote when the polling stations reopened, but as we all knew that most of us would change our clothes and get ready to rest when we went home, and it was unlikely that we would come back. Even if the EAC later extended the voting time to 12 midnight, it does not mean that these voters will return to vote.
This mistake is undoubtedly serious, so the chief executive also ordered the relevant departments to complete a detailed report within three months, explaining to the public the reasons for the mistake that day and how to improve to ensure that similar problems do not recur.
Five
The final polling was completed, with a territory-wide average turnout rate of 27.54% and about 1.2 million eligible voters taking part in the polls. If there were no server problems, the turnout was estimated to increase by another 1.5%-2%.
Many media, especially foreign media, are keen to talk about the voter turnout. In fact, this turnout is quite good. When we were canvassing for votes in the districts, we often heard many citizens say that since the society is calm and all the candidates are patriots and Hong Kongers, there is no need for them to come out to vote. In addition, many voters are not familiar with the new electoral system, so they did not participate in the vote this time.
Compared with the turnout of regional elections in many parts of the world, the turnout rate of nearly 30% is actually a reasonable figure. Of course, the study of Hong Kong's district councils needs to be observed in the longer term, after all, this is the first election after the reform, and it is too early to draw conclusions.
I believe that voter turnout is only one aspect of the study, and that the current focus of Hong Kong's governance should not remain at the electoral level, but should focus more on governance issues. How to promote the optimization of grassroots governance and promote good governance should become a key issue for the whole society.
The names of the new District Councils were announced on December 12 and all elected District Council members will be sworn in on January 1 of the new year. How to do a good job in the advisory role of district administration, assist the government in promoting local livelihood policies, and how to cooperate with the local three associations and care teams to seek the well-being of the people are all more worthy of our attention, research and implementation.
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