“6.22 Civil Referendum” e-Platform Fighting Hard Back

The “6.22 Civil Referendum” organized by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) of The University of Hong Kong and the Centre for Social Policy Studies (CSPS) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University was rolled out on schedule at 12:00 noon today. As of 6:00pm, the voting platform successfully received 232,270 (i.e. over 232,000) votes. However, as reported by the CloudFlare team which is fighting side by side with us, the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks mitigated by them never stop, and are very fierce and persistent at no less than 300Gb per second. Even the Chief Executive of CloudFlare considered such attack scale rarely seen. CloudFlare will continue to safeguard the voting system around the clock, in order to let Hong Kong people express their opinions peacefully.

In light of the non-stop attacks targeted at our system, which are four times the magnitude of that recorded during our mock voting period, POP and CSPS therefore decided to keep the contingency plan announced two days earlier, that is to extend the voting period till June 29. Because we cannot maintain the number of official polling stations, POP and CSPS now decide to set up a limited number of subsidiary polling stations in response to the public demand, in order to make up to the same operation scale. Nevertheless, these subsidiary polling stations should strictly follow the operation guidelines issued by POP, to ensure all voters will not be disturbed and can cast their votes peacefully and rationally. Detailed arrangements will be announced in due course.

At the same time, POP has already printed 100,000 paper ballots for back up, and many more can be printed on demand. As for the DDoS attacks targeted at POP, the Police has already begun their investigation.

投票時間 Voting Time

投票數目 （累積數字） Turnout Figures (Accumulative)

請瀏覽《PopVote普及投票》網站https://popvote.hk查閱最新投票數字。如果系統癱瘓，則有關數字會透過傳真不定期發放。

Please click on PopVote project website at https://popvote.hk to obtain the latest turnout figures. Fax update would only be dispatched, irregularly, if the website is down.