He made the remarks as the SAR gears up to co-host the National Games in November with the Legislative Council election taking place the following month.
“There’s a lot of public attention on the National Games which happen to be taking place at the end of the year. So, when we were coming up with a promotion strategy for the elections, we were hoping to generate a reciprocally positive effect. For example, we could use sports as a theme when promoting the elections, or there could be some interaction between the mascots. The most important thing is to have a teaser effect,” Tsang said in an interview with RTHK to mark the third anniversary of Chief Executive John Lee’s administration.
Tsang also said electronic polling and vote-counting at the Legco election would mean that results would be known earlier. He said automatic vote-counting would be used in the functional constituencies and that there were back-up plans in case of any problems.
“Currently, we have two systems to conduct automatic vote-counting with one being the main system. We also have a secondary system that can be immediately activated in case of any problems. And if the secondary system also encounters problems, we’ll switch to manual vote-counting, so there are three layers of protection. And rest assured we’ll go through many rounds of testing. We’ll even have independent contractors look at the security, privacy, and other aspects of the ballots, so we can make sure that the systems are reliable.”
The coming legislative election will see candidates compete for 90 seats, with 40 reserved for the Election Committee constituency, 30 for trade-based functional constituencies and 20 for geographical constituencies.
Tsang added that the government might add more voting stations near the border to help Hongkongers living or working on the mainland to vote in the election.
