Postal voting will not be allowed in the upcoming District Council election, leaving hundreds of thousands of absentee Hong Kongers without a voice in the upcoming “patriots-only” District Council elections.
A spokeswoman for the Chief Election Officer told this newsletter that postal voting would not be implemented for the December election or in the future, citing issues surrounding identity verification, potential outside influence on voters and the potential for postal delays.
The issue came to light as the Registration and Electoral Office (REO) revealed preferential absentee voting arrangements for Hong Kong residents who now live in the mainland.
Pro-establishment lawmakers had earlier said it was unfair to make residents travel from mainland cities to their former Hong Kong constituencies to vote. “[Y]ou have to travel all the way across the border to Hong Kong Island and then go back, it takes you like three hours,” said DAB’s Holden Chow in September.
The government then announced it would open special polling booths close to the border to help Hong Kongers living in the mainland cast their vote in the District Council geographic election in December without travelling to their actual registered constituency.
Hundreds of shuttle buses will ferry up to 38,000 eligible mainland absentees from the MTR station at border town Sheung Shui to unique “all constituency” polling booths at HKTA Tang Hin Memorial Secondary School and TWGHs Kap Yan Directors’ College, both schools around a 5-6 minute walk from the MTR station, according to REO.
If demand exceeds the 38,000 quota cap, REO says it will “exercise discretion” to increase the mainland voting quota.
Leaving non-mainland absentees behind
But while pro-establishment politicians welcomed the move, no absentee arrangements were made for the estimated 200,000 or so Hong Kongers who had recently moved away from the city to places other than the mainland.
The majority of those expats have moved to the UK: in fact, 144,500 Hong Kongers have moved to the UK in the last two years, according to the UK Home Office, representing a large potential voting bloc whose voice, without postal voting, will not be heard.
When asked this week what provision the electoral office had made for these Hong Kong absentees, the electoral office stuttered.
“[I]t will be impossible for the polling staff to verify their identities and to guard against impersonation. Furthermore, without requiring electors to mark their ballot papers inside the voting compartments, polling staff and candidates/agents thereat will no longer be able to monitor the process to ascertain that the electors are voting according to their own choice and free from outside influence or interference. Besides, in view of the nature of the postal process, there must be effective security measures to prevent the ballot papers from being intercepted or inspected, or the votes concerned being uncounted due to postal delay, thereby affecting the results of the poll,” the REO spokeswoman told Transit Jam in an email.
Former US president Donald Trump had raised many similar concerns ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, claiming, even as the incumbent candidate, that postal voting was a “whole big scam” rife for manipulation.
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” he wrote on Twitter in June 2020.
A record 66 million Americans cast postal votes in that election, twice the number of mail-ins seen for Trump’s winning election in 2016 and thought to be a phenomenon driven by Covid shutdowns.
Absentee voting is well-established and common in Europe and North America, as well as India, Indonesia, South Korea and Sri Lanka.
Switzerland now sees around 80% of its electorate vote by mail, with a former official estimating postal votes increase turnout by around 15% nationwide and has doubled turnout in Geneva.
Swiss mail-in votes began as a service for the sick in the 1980s, and fraud is uncommon: in more than 40 years of mail-in votes, Swiss authorities have found just five attempts to manipulate the vote.
But experts warn postal voting needs to be implemented cautiously and over years, not months.
One possible solution to Hong Kong’s ID-verification concerns for absentee voters could be its own iAM Smart+ app, now offering Hong Kong residents living in Guangdong access to dozens of ID-sensitive services including passport application, financial assistance, filing of tax returns and incorporating a company.
Within Hong Kong, iAM Smart+ offers hundreds of ID-proof services such as vehicle registration and access to health records.
The Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau, which runs iAM Smart+, did not yet respond to questions on whether iAM Smart+ could be used for voting at home, on the mainland or even further afield.
I made a typo in my questions to the Innovation Bureau, where I wrote "IUD-verification" instead of "ID-verification" in a paragraph asking all about iAM SMART, voter verification and voting. They responded that my concern on the operation of Intrauterine Devices (IUDs) was outside their purview 😂. It takes a special kind of intelligence to read something so literally and so wrong...