Accountancy lawmaker Kenneth Leung makes plea as many focus on ‘super seats’
TONY.CHEUNG@SCMP.COM
UPDATED : Tuesday, 26 April, 2016, 12:01am
Leung notes it is professional voters who pick 300 representatives on the election committee that votes for the city’s chief executive. Photo: Jonathan Wong.
Hong Kong’s professionals should register to vote in their sectors as soon as possible as their ballots will help decide who runs the city in the next five years, accountancy lawmaker Kenneth Leung said.
Leung was worried about a decrease or a slow increase in the number of voters in some professional sectors such as lawyers, accountants and social workers from 2012 to last year.
He believed the problem was partly caused by people switching their voter registration to the Legislative Council’s“super seats”, which were considered more important than traditional functional constituencies such as the professionals’ seats.
There are 30 traditional functional constituency seats in Legco for business elites and professionals, elected by about 230,000 voters. In contrast, the five “super seats” were elected by more than three million people who did not have a vote for any of the 30 functional seats.
“I hope those who switched their registration can consider switching back to their professional sectors before the voter registration period ends next Monday,” said Leung, adding there would be “intense competition in the functional constituencies in the September poll”.
More importantly, Leung said, it was professional voters and not “super seat” voters who would pick 300 representatives on the 1,200-strong Election Committee in November. That committee is to decide whether Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying or someone else is elected the city’s top official in March next year. The city’s 70 lawmakers are ex-officio members of the committee.
In 2011, about 200 pan-democrats, many of them professionals, were elected members of the panel. They helped then-Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho Chun-yan secure enough nominations to run for the city’s top job against Leung and former chief secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen.
“We don’t know whether any pan-democrat will run next year,” Kenneth Leung said. “But if we have more votes and are influential ... I hope there will be a candidate who considers the people of Hong Kong his or her priority ... and whose election platform will be favoured by them.”
Citing a survey conducted by his office, Leung said 24,600 voters were registered in the accountancy sector in 2011. From 2012 to last year, 3,100 more registered, but until last year, the total number of voters only increased by some 400 as about 2,700 cancelled their voter registration in the sector.
It was unclear why they did so or how many of them switched their voter registration to the “super seats” as the Registration and Electoral Office did not have such information, the lawmaker added.
In the social welfare sector, there were 14,200 voters in 2011, and 1,300 more registered since then. But the sectors’ voters had dropped to 13,600 last year as 1,900 cancelled their registration. Labour Party’s Peter Cheung Kwok-che has represented the sector since 2008.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/1938420/hong-kong-professionals-urged-register-vote-their-functional
