The general election of the Legislative Council will be held in December. In view of the serious "tortoise counting" and other serious "tortoise counting" in the Election Committee subsector elections earlier, the outside world is concerned about the EAC's measures to prevent chaos in the Legislative Council elections. elephant.
The EAC announced today (25th) the Legislative Council election guidelines, mentioning a number of improvement measures. Among them, the polling time was extended to 8:30 to give polling staff more time to prepare electronic voter register systems and other equipment. At the same time, cursor machines are being used. For electoral committee sectors where votes are counted, optical mark readers will be provided at polling stations for voters to check whether the ballot papers have selected 40 candidates.
1. The old arrangements such as direct elections and functional constituencies continue to use manual counting of votes
The election of the Election Committee held in September this year used optical readers to count the votes. After the election, the ballots from the five voting stations must be transported to the central counting station of the exhibition and counted. The staff must first count the votes from the five voting stations. , The ballots of 13 sectors are classified according to individual sector groups before the counting can begin. During the counting, the cursor machine "paper jam" occurred. In the end, more than 4,000 ballots took more than 14 hours to complete. Count the votes.
Feng Hua pointed out today that the above situation will not be repeated in the Legislative Council elections.
He explained that both local direct elections and functional constituency ballots were counted manually, which was consistent with previous legislative council elections.
He pointed out that the functional constituency ballots will be transported to the central counting station for counting after the voting is over. Since voters in this subsector only need to choose one candidate, plus the manual counting of votes, the situation is similar to that of the Election Committee election. Different.
2. The electoral commission sector uses cursor machines to count the ballots before entering the ballot box to check the ballots
The new election committee sector will adopt the "block vote system". The number of candidates voted by voters in this sector must be no less than or no less than the number of members of the sector, that is, 40. An optical mark reader is used to count the votes.
Feng Hua said that in order to prevent the vote from being invalid due to the wrong selection of more or less than 40 voters, optical mark readers will be provided in the polling stations of the Election Committee sector for voters to check whether the selected candidates on the ballot are 40.
Feng Hua said that voters are encouraged to use the optical mark reader to confirm the accuracy before putting it into the ballot box, emphasizing that the optical mark reader will not record or count the choices on the ballot paper.
3. Shorten the voting time and allow the staff of the voting station to prepare electronic voter registers and other equipment
Feng Hua pointed out that in response to this general election of the Legislative Council, an electronic voter register system and other improvement measures will be adopted to allow polling staff to have more time for relevant equipment, including data network connection settings, for final inspections and voting time. It will be changed from the previous 7:30 am to 10:30 pm (15 hours in total) to 8:30 am to 10.30 pm (14 hours in total).
4. If the documents are not complete, the vote will be counted as usual unless it affects the unpacking and counting
The EAC mentioned in the Election Committee election report that on the night of counting the ballot boxes, election documents and materials, the ballot boxes were transported to the central counting station. The staff of the central counting station found that the staff of the polling station filled in There was an error in the ballot settlement sheet, and there were omissions in the process of storing election documents and materials. Therefore, it was necessary for the staff at the counting station to correct the error or fix the omissions before starting the procedure of opening the ballot box, which resulted in a long processing time.
Feng Huajin clearly pointed out at the press conference that in the case of incomplete documents, unless it affects the unpacking and counting of votes, he will adopt the method of "processing all the way and counting the votes all the way", describing "(document) fills in and fills in well. , You can change back."
5. To prevent the reappearance of "the dragon" in the morning, the director of the ticketing station will flexibly deploy the invoice counter
On the day of the Election Committee election, there was a queue in the morning. The report stated that the reason was that the staff at the invoice counter were not familiar with the operation of the new system, which slowed the process. At the same time, voters had more enquiries about the new arrangement, and some people made mistakes. Ballots, it will take time to explain and replace the ballots.
The EAC stated that with the assistance of the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer and the Electronic Voter Register System Technical Advisory Committee, the polling stations for the general election of the Legislative Council will use the electronic voter register system to issue ballots, in order to make the issue of ballot papers more efficient and effective. precise.
After entering the polling station, voters will be instructed to pick up their ballots at one of the invoice counters.
After checking the voter’s Hong Kong identity card, polling staff will use a flat-screen computer to scan the person’s Hong Kong identity card to verify whether the person has registered the type of ballot issued to the voter.
The EAC continued to point out that in order to ensure the accuracy of the invoices, the voters concerned can observe their names, partial ID card numbers and the types of ballots issued from the system display screen during the invoice process.
To ensure the confidentiality of the vote, the electronic voter register system will only record the number, type and time of the vote issued to the voter, but will not record which vote was issued to the voter, and there will be no one in the polling station. Face recognition device.
At the same time, taking into account the order and overall situation of the polling station, the presiding officer will flexibly deploy the invoice counter to make full use of the invoice counter, speed up the diversion of voters to the invoice counter to collect votes, thereby reducing the overall waiting time.
Two teams are set up outside the polling station, one is for people in need (that is, people aged 70 or above, pregnant women, and people who cannot stand in line for a long time due to their physical condition), and the other is for other general people.
Seats will be provided in the polling station for those in need to sit and rest, and wait for the queue to pick up ballots later.
Feng Hua, chairman of the EAC.
(Profile picture)
Feng Hua: The computer is a box, you can’t see it through
When asked if he would apologize for the chaos in the election of the Election Committee, Feng Hua pointed out that he "has apologized on behalf of everyone" on the day of the counting of votes. The committee must be responsible. Therefore, the EAC has already given a preliminary account of the situation in the election. It also stated that the use of new equipment in the election "must be problematic", especially the computer. It is described as "The channel (computer) is a box. You can't pass the channel." ."
Regarding the establishment of legislators who requested the government to replace Feng Hua, Feng Hua pointed out that the chairman of the EAC must be a judge of the High Court, and there is no supplement to the system and the selection of candidates.
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