Nearly 50,000 Citizens Cast Votes On Site for “6.22 Civil Referendum”Back

The “6.22 Civil Referendum” 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 opened 15 onsite polling stations today all over Hong Kong, to let citizens vote onsite. The polling stations were open for 12 hours (10am to 10pm), and recorded a total of 48,968 on site votes from the citizens. Among them, 48,141 cast their votes via the electronic system at the stations and 827 people (i.e. 2%) cast paper ballots. Also, as of 00:00 mid night, after 60 hours of operation, the offsite e-voting system had recorded 656,286 electronic votes, giving a total of 705,254 (i.e. over 700,000) votes. Regarding repeated voting, the votes cast at onsite polling stations shall prevail in the final vote count on June 29, repeated e-votes will be eliminated by the system, and hence the number of final votes will be lower than the raw figures. POP will announce to the public the number of repeated votes eliminated.

The arrangement of “6.22 Civil Referendum” in the coming week:

During the voting period, POP will release on popvote website the number of votes on an hourly basis. If the website is down, POP will release these figures irregularly via other channels, including fax, Facebook, and so on. According to the latest report of CloudFlare team, DDoS attacks never stops but are all under control, hence the offsite voting system is operating normally.

Robert CHUNG Ting-yiu, Director of POP, remarks, “With all the onsite polling stations running smoothly and orderly, it shows that citizens respect and treasure this kind of peaceful and rational channel to express their opinions. POP appreciates very much the trust that Hong Kong citizens have in our team and we also trust Hong Kong citizens are honest and trustworthy, they are civil members with quality. Those who do not understand or are dissatisfied with the motions can choose the “abstention” option and those who do not agree with expressing their opinions through civil referendum can choose not to participate at all but no need to use dishonest or even illegal ways to interfere with the voting system which in turn deprive the rights of other citizens in expressing their opinions.”

With regards the critics saying that civil referendum is illegal, Robert Chung responds, “According to the legal principle of ‘One country, two systems’, civil referendum is of course with no legal effect but is both legal and constitutional, it is of no difference to other public opinion mechanisms, which is, one of the basic rights of Hong Kong citizens and is protected by the Basic Law. Those who believe that civil referendum is illegal should further elaborate with proof.”