Hearing on challenges to electoral roll told of elderly people being registered without consent
CHRIS LAU AND JOYCE NG
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 08 September, 2015, 12:02am
UPDATED : Tuesday, 08 September, 2015, 3:01am
The challenges to voter registration come ahead of election campaigning later this year. Photo: Oliver Tsang
A magistrate yesterday ordered a raft of names struck off the electoral register and referred at least seven suspicious cases for police investigation ahead of November's district council polls.
Sitting as an electoral revising officer at Sha Tin Court, Andrew Ma Hon-cheung called for an investigation after hearing that some of the 199 registered voters whose cases he reviewed - most of them residents of homes for the elderly - never actually applied for the chance to vote.
Ma, an acting chief magistrate, is one of three magistrates appointed to hear complaints by the public to the Registration and Electoral Office against 329 voters ahead of the November polls.
In one of the cases, Ma heard, the grandson of an elderly resident of a Wing On Home for the Aged had to write to officials from the office to confirm that his grandmother could not possibly have registered to vote as she was no longer able to function.
Ma took the woman's name off the register along with those of three other residents of that home - the address of which court officials would not disclose - and three at Shek Lei Kind Heart Elderly Care Home. He referred the seven cases to police, noting the voters may have been registered without their permission.
The magistrate urged poll officials to implement more stringent vetting procedures.
In a number of cases, election officials urged Ma to keep elderly voters on the register, on the grounds they were registered at the correct address and simply could not remember whether they had signed up to vote.
"You are making the court guess. How can I arrive at a decision ... when there are doubts?" Ma asked. "Elderly people stand the highest chance of being manipulated."
Ma adjourned some of the cases until tomorrow to give officers a chance to revisit the voters concerned with an original copy of their registration document to give them context.
Most of the cases involved voters with dubious addresses or large numbers of people with different surnames occupying the same home.
Electoral officers explained that some of the dubious addresses were the result of errors in the registration process, while those involving multiple surnames were often a result of voters forgetting to update their addresses after moving.
But one voter who attended yesterday's hearing told Ma her address had been changed without her consent. Ma said someone might have made such changes to hinder a voter from receiving information about the election, thereby depriving them of their right to vote.
Election officials refused to give a tally of how many voters were purged from the register.
Complaints have been made about some 2,000 voters since the provisional register was published in July. About 500 have been withdrawn since then. The cases have sparked concern after the 2011 district polls were marred by a torrent of voting fraud cases. Anyone who gives false or misleading details faces up to six months in jail and a fine of up to HK$5,000.
Andrew Wan Siu-kin, a Democratic Party councillor in Kwai Tsing district, lodged 55 objections, of which 10 were substantiated and 17 were adjourned. Wan said penalties for registering false or misleading addresses should be increased.
He was accused by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong of falsely reporting one voter.
Ma Ngok, a political scientist at Chinese University, said the Registration and Electoral Office should have a strong investigation team instead of relying on people to lodge complaints.
"Their position is like: 'We don't have resources to check, so everyone please help keep an eye on it'. This shifts the costs and burden to the courts," he said.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1856161/unable-function-registered-vote-hong-kong-police-called
