Elections in Hong Kong

Elections are held in Hong Kong when certain offices in the government need to be filled. Every four years, the unicameral Legislative Council of Hong Kong's sixty seats are filled by the electorate.

Hong Kong has a multi-party system, with numerous parties in which no one party often has the chance of gaining power alone. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong is non-partisan, but has to work with several parties to form (de facto) coalition governments.

See election for a more comprehensive discussion and the List of democracy and elections-related topics for an overview on related topics.

Legislative Elections

Main article: Hong Kong legislative election

The Legislative Council has 60 members, of whom 30 are elected by popular vote in geographical constituencies, and 30 elected from functional constituencies (businessmen and professionals).

In Hong Kong, legislative elections are held every four years, in years evenly divisible by four. The most recent election was held September 12, 2004. The next would presumably occur in September 2008.

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong currently holds a plurality of the seats with twelve in the legislature, but they form only twenty percent of the house. This again stresses the factor that coalitions are often necessary to form governments with legal mandates.

The Liberals hold ten seats, while the Democratic Party holds nine.

Electoral system

The 30 geographical seats of the Legislative Council are returned by proportional representation using the Largest remainder method in each of five constituencies. This system has the advantage of providing representative governments.

Twenty-three of the 28 functional constituencies use single-member district plurality to elect their members, one (Labour) applies the Block vote(with three seats to be filled), and four, dubbed special functional constituencies, use the preferential elimination system (aka Instant Runoff Voting).

The system for geographical constituencies has evolved over time. The first popular election in 1991 used a dual-seat constituency dual vote system with two seats to be filled in each constituency, and responding to criticism, new election methods were explored, and the possibility of electoral reform was almost certain, with single non-transferable vote (SNTV) and party-list proportional representation being strongly considered. However, responding to public dissatisfication with the details, the electoral reform movement started losing popularity and, in the end, the government prescribed simple plurality as a last resort.

The problems of this system were quickly realized when the DAB obtained one-quarter of the vote and received only two out of 20 directly elected seats in the 1995 elections - the final before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. The artificial majority of the democratic camp received harsh criticism from the pro-Beijing camp and the Chinese government. The same two options from the last session were brought back to the agenda; and when Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa came to power, he selected proportional representation over SNTV as the new system. This system has since effectively reinforce the executive-led structure and has been retained since without substantial change.

District Council elections

Main article: Hong Kong District Council election

There are eighteen districts, and thus eighteen district councils in Hong Kong, each being a city council for its district. There is one constituency for, on average, every 17 000 residents, as there are 400 constituencies and 6.8 million residents in Hong Kong. A member is elected from each constituency by simple plurality. Since one councillor is elected from each district, there are 400 legislators in the 18 district councils. The Chief Executive can appoint a maximum of 102 members to the councils, and the chairpersons of the 27 rural committees are ex officio members of the councils.

Chief Executive elections

According to Article 46 of the constitution (the Basic Law of Hong Kong), elections for the Chief Executive are held every five years. The last was held in 2002, and with the resignation of Tung Chee Hwa an election would have been called on July 10, had the election been contested. A controversial decision by the National People's Congress stated that a resignation did not end a term, so that Donald Tsang would serve only until 2007, rather than 2010 had a term been deemed to begin with each resignation. This is in line with the practice on mainland China. (See Hong Kong Basic Law Article 46.) The 800-member Election Committee held a vote on a day specified by the sitting Chief Executive sometime during the six months of the year prior to the HKSAR's Inauguration Day, July 1. An absolute majority of the votes (ie. 401 votes) are required to be elected; if necessary, a runoff is held between the two top candidates (in terms of electoral votes) on a later date.

In 1997, Tung Chee-Hwa was elected with eighty percent of the electoral votes against two other candidates, Mr. Peter Woo (吳光正) and Sir Ti Liang Yang (楊鐵樑). In 2002, Tung was re-elected uncontested, as he had received 713 signatures of support in the Electoral Committee, and 100 are required for nomination.(Annex I, Section 4, Basic Law)

The 2005 election provided a sense of déjà vu for many, as Donald Tsang cruised to victory with 674 nomination signatures out of a possible 796 (four seats were vacant).

The Election Committee

An 800-member electoral college called the Election Committee is elected by businessmen and professionals (those eligible for functional constituencies, with less than 180 000 eligible voters), with each of the twenty-eight sectors of the economy receiving a set number of electoral votes. The eligible voters in each sector vote directly for the electors, who in turn cast ballots for Chief Executive.

Before 2004, the Electoral College also selected certain members of LegCo by block vote, but this practice has been abolished, in accordance with Ann. 2, Sect. 1, of the Basic Law, and all seats are elected either by universal suffrage or the business elite.

The EC elections are quite irregular. They were held in 1998 and 2000, but none (except for the 2002 by-election) have been held since. The claim in Ann. 1, Sect. 2, of the Basic Law, saying that the Election Committee must be renewed at least once every five years, exposed an interesting flaw in the system that was averted when Tsang was the only candidate nominated.

The problem was that the timing is crucial for the new Chief Executive election after Tung Chee Hwa's resignation on March 12, 2005. Since electoral law states that an election must be held 120 days after the vacancy, an election would be held on the tenth of July. It was unclear as to the exact time period separating the election and the date of taking of office for this Election Committee. If the new EC convened prior to the Chief Executive election, it would be applied to select the next Chief Executive, but otherwise the old Election Committee dating from 2000 would have to complete the task. See Hong Kong Chief Executive election, 2005 for more information on the topic. The second round produces a further dispute, if the term of the old EC ended after the first round of voting but before the second. It would be rather unsensible to use different electors for the two rounds; the same one would probably would have to be prescribed.