The silent majority made its collective voice heard and broke records by staying away from the 2023 District Council "election"!

  

The kind of advertising I wish Hong Kong had less of!

 

Yesterday morning, I was awoken by my phone ringing.  When I answered, I heard an automated message asking me to please go out and vote in the District Council "election".  Or at least, I think I did because I was only half awake and really wanted to just go back to sleep!  Then, later in the day, before a film screening properly got underway, a message (in three languages -- Cantonese, English and Mandarin) was aired asking people to go vote.  You could almost hear as well as smell the desperation of those trying so hard to avoid yesterday's event having a record low turnout!

 

Alas, for those folks, it was all in vain.  Despite the crazy amounts of advertising all over Hong Kong, in the words of CNN's Nectar Gan, "Hong Kongers on Sunday delivered another apparent snub to China’s “patriots only” overhaul of the city’s electoral system, as local polls that barred the opposition from standing drew the lowest turnout in decades."  

 

Over on Twitter, Joel Chan was keeping tabs by the hour of the electoral turnout and very early on, it was evident that the turnout was low for the first national security law-era District Council "election" and on course to not be anywhere near the 71.2% voter turnout of the 2019 truly democratic district council election that had some 2.94 million Hong Kongers casting their votes and saw the pro-democrats win by a landslide.  Heck, by lunchtime, Chan was forecasting that the total votal turnout would not be able to match, never mind exceed, the 30.2% voter turnout of the 2021 Legislative Council "election"!   

 

Actually, a friend of mine had confidently predicted this weeks ago -- based on what she had seen and heard and knew about her fellow Hongkongers!)  And so it came to pass.  With not even the voting time being extended to midnight (due to voter registration system problems!) being able to help much at all!  

 

To put it mildly, the final voter count of 1,193,193 votes and voting percentage of 27.5% looks absolutely pathetic when compared to 2019!  And for the record: the 2023 District Council "election" had the lowest ever voting percentage; lower even than any of the District Council elections held before the Handover as well as being the lowest among those held after!  For whereas in 2019, the "silent majority" that the authorities had assumed was on their side went out and voted for the pro-democrats, this time around, the "silent majority" decided against taking part in what was widely seen as sham elections.  

 

"[F]or context", as the Twitter account known as John deFROG pointed out: "the election yesterday was for 88 seats out of 470 (with 27 for rural committee chairs, and the rest either appointed by govt or elected by small pro-Beijing committees), so the pro Beijing camp already controlled 382 seats before the voting even started."  And not content with cutting the number of elected seats on the District Councils from more than 90 percent down to 20 percent back in May of this year, the authorities also made it so that there was not a single pro-democracy candidate running in the "election".

 

So, although those not following what's been happening in Hong Kong for the past four years may not realize, actually, Hong Kong voters have delivered the same message once again: that we want genuine universal suffrage (which, remember, is one of protestors' "five demands" and the sole "demand" of the Umbrella Movement back in 2014).  

 

And speaking of protestors: three members of the League of Social Democrats, including chairwoman Chan Po-ying, were stopped and arrested yesterday on their way to protest the city’s “patriots-only” District Council "election".  (A measure of the deterioration of freedoms in Hong Kong can be seen in their being able to carry out their protest of the Legislative Council "election" just two years ago, in 2021.)  And it's looking like they will be charged -- like another League of Social Democrats member, Koo Sze-chiu, who was arrested on Friday -- with sedition.

 

Others arrested yesterday include a 41-year-old government employee and her husband on suspicion of inciting others to cast invalid votes by commenting on a social media post which urged voters to put three or more ticks on their ballot paper.  A sixth individual, a 51-year-old female clerk, was arrested -- by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), as opposed to the police (national security or otherwise) -- "for allegedly calling on others to write their names and identity card numbers on the ballot papers, which would render the votes invalid."

 

On the subject of spoilt votes: It's turned out that 22,045 of the votes cast yesterday were declared invalid.  Was this primarily the result of a "spoilt votes" campaign or human error, particularly on the part of elderly and/or less-educated voters who are prone to this?  We will never know.  But what's known is that it's close to double the number of spoiled votes in 2019 (which was 12,097).   Finally, one election statistic that's higher in 2023 than 2019!