Audrey LO and Kenneth Ka-Lok CHAN
Election Observation Project, Comparative Governance & Policy Research Centre, Department of Government & International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
27 August 2021
Games that are fixed can only fail to impress.
The 2021 Election Committee Subsector Ordinary Elections (ECSE) will be held on September 19, 2021, after which elected members will be responsible for picking 40 Legislative Councilors in December, electing Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive in March 2021. Should needs be, they will also be able to insert fellow Committee members directly to the Legislature.
Published on August 5, voter register of the ECSE tally to a total of 7,971, a striking 96.77% decrease from the 246,440 voters recorded in the last round five years ago. This is due largely to the removal of individual voters across the broad.
Initially, 982 seats out of the 1,500 seats on the Election Committee can be selected through a range of subsector elections, while the remaining seats are either occupied by ex-officio members or nominated individuals through designated bodies. One caveat, however, allows for members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) or National People’s Congress (NPC) who are associated with other subsectors to occupy the electable seats, further reducing total electable seats to 967.
As the nomination period draws to a close, it is perhaps the time to examine how the ECSE will likely play out.
In 2016, the pro-democracy camp launched the Democrats 300+ (D300+) action, of the 360 candidates sent to contest Election Committee seats, 298 were elected (out of 1,034 electable seats, 28.8%). If we look closely at the subsectors they challenged ---- predominantly of the Second Sector as well as Hong Kong and Kowloon District Council subsector, these are the same ones received the harshest makeover. To prevent democrats who won a landslide in the 2019 District Council Election from entering the Election Committee, District Councilors no longer hold seats in the Election Committee and have been replaced by various community-level committee members appointed by the government; ‘Higher Education’ was merged into ‘Education’; ‘Health Services’ and ‘Medical’ have combined into one; whilst all Professional Subsectors that constitute the Second Sector no longer allow for individual voters just as it suffered a 53% decrease in electable seats.
According to the Electoral Affairs Commission, 1,016 nominations have been submitted for the 967 seats. Starkly different to the 2016 ECSE, however, only 364 seats are contested (compared to 748 in 2016). Assuming all nominations are accepted with a 100% turnout on the polling day on September 19, merely 4,889 votes will be cast, while 1,136 seats (75.7%) have already been filled by uncontested nominees and the ex-officio members.
While the election appears to be no more than a game played by the pro-establishment circles of Hong Kong and one distant to other members of the society, it is worth noting that elections, when properly arranged, are supposed to be inclusive for all to exercise their political rights and hence should reflect different shade of views and interests in society.
Well, how does the public actually think about the election?
Hong Kong Election Observation Project (HKEOP) have been collaborating with Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (HKPORI), under the “We Hongkongers” initiative, on a series of mini panel surveys (usually comprised of 4-6 questions) since February 2021. In the latest wave of survey, 5,916 respondents were probed specifically on the upcoming elections.
The survey first asked about respondents’ familiarity with the 2021 Election Committee Subsector Ordinary Elections. Only 11% expressed that they were familiar with the new system, while 57% responded otherwise.
A couple factors could have contributed to this apparent lack of knowledge amongst the people of Hong Kong.
First, the design of the new electoral system is far from straightforward, with the pathways to eligibility becoming ever more complicated. Second, unlike other controversial or major bills affecting the basic rights of Hong Kong people, the media coverage on the electoral reform focused initially on Beijing’s decision, while changes of all aspects are often densely compressed, thereby demanding huge effort for one to attempt to digest huge amounts of information regarding the changing rules of the game. Especially as it is widely acknowledged, even before the announcement of the amendments, that the three upcoming elections will be unfair according to another survey we carried out in April this year, where 68% felt the electoral reform have stretched our society further apart from democracy and universal suffrage (HKPORI x HKEOP “We Hongkongers” Report No. 44). Third, the lack of public consultation before the passage of the Bill in the Legislative Council have further discouraged public discussion on the amendments. Finally, the ESCE has traditionally attracted less interest among Hong Kongers due specifically to its small-circle nature, it is thus not surprising that an even smaller circle election involving less than 0.1% of the population is received coldly by the public.
Next, the second and third questions in the survey concerned whether respondents were aware of their eligibility to participate in the Election Committee Subsector Election.
Around 40% of the respondents reported to have had the chance to participate in the ECSE before. With the new system in place, however, the number is reduced to 23%.
Notably, 27% answered “don’t know or hard to tell” for the upcoming election, a 17% increase compared to previous elections. This is worrying for by the time the survey was carried out, the nomination period had already ended. Again, the very gist of having an election is to enable citizens to participate in political affairs. If more than a quarter of the sample population fail to comprehend their own eligibility status, that pool of people is effectively barred from participation. One could not help but doubt if elections are still what they are supposed to be.
In short, data from the two questions concur with the new political reality that both levels of participation and representativeness have shrunken substantially. People are far from being convinced by the government’s suggestion that the changes amount to “improvements” of the electoral system.
This concern is further backed up by the fourth question of our survey for a smaller number of respondents who are being represented by others who registered to vote. 61% of pro-democracy respondents said they “don’t know/hard to tell” the extent to they are going to be represented, whilst one-third suggest they cannot be represented at all.
One possible explanation is that, thanks to the current political climate which is extremely unforgiving against the opposition parties and candidates, most pro-democracy politicians have shunned the elections altogether. Coupled with extreme unfamiliarity of the ECSE, these pro-democracy respondents have no way of knowing how the election will turn out.
Perhaps somehow surprisingly, 44% of the non-pro-democracy respondents felt unrepresented; with only 18% felt that the eligible voters can reflect their voting preferences. This points to a revealing observation - this election fails to earn recognition even amongst its most likely supporters - the politically conservative electorates.
Given that all nominations face the scrutiny of the newly established Candidate Eligibility Review Committee (CERC) led by the Chief Secretary John Lee, one thing has become crystal clear, it is impossible to claim that these elections are truly representative of the will of the people.