“6.22 Civil Referendum” e-Platform Running SmoothlyBack

The “6.22 Civil Referendum” e-Platform operated by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at The University of Hong Kong and Centre for Social Policy Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has been running smoothly after successfully resisting a close to crazy level of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks yesterday. According to the report of the CloudFlare team, all cyber attacks are now under control, Hong Kong citizens can continue to express their views peacefully and rationally, which we should be gratified. As of 6 pm today, after 30 hours of operation, the electronic system has recorded 521,730 (i.e. over 520,000) votes in total.

Since “civil referendum” and public opinion research in general are different from government official activities, which the starting point is based on the belief that all citizens are honest and trustworthy, hence resources should not be wasted on setting up defenses here and there. If citizens suspect their identities are being used by others, they can go to the physical polling stations starting from tomorrow and cast their votes after their identities have been verified in person. The onsite votes recorded will override the offsite votes by computer programmes during our final vote count. If citizens wish to have the best protection or to exhibit their belief by casting a physical vote, they can choose to vote at one of the polling stations.

POP Director Robert Ting-yiu Chung reminds citizens, “Civil Referendum welcomes the participation of citizens with different political stands, on the premise of mutual respect, in a peaceful and rational way. Citizens who will vote please do not forget the ultimate meaning behind civil referendum because of the criticisms and provocations of others.”

Regarding people’s skepticism towards the voter turnout, Robert Chung believes there are a handful of solutions. Scientifically, one can hire an independent organization to conduct a scientific research to verify the turnout. If to appeal to the people, one can ask citizens who have voted to declare on a certain day, at a certain time and in a certain way, which can be going on the street, standing still or putting on stickers. Yet, since civil referendum is to encourage citizens to express their opinions peacefully and rationally, and the system design has been reasonably rigorous already, people should focus on the results and meaning of the referendum. 

There are rumours about some so-called voting loopholes, such as the same phone number or HKID number could be used to vote repeatedly, we believe they are all misinformation and have been clarified on Facebook.