Yesterday (2023-12-10) was the Hong Kong District Council Election (DC Election), and we have the data today.
Only 27.54% of all citizens who are eligible for voting ended up voting in this election.
It can be verified on the government website (as long as they are not lying).
For reference, last election in 2019, 71% of eligible citizens participated in the voting.
I believe everyone in Hong Kong knows what caused this, even the government. As a Hongkonger myself, I will try explaining it to you.
In order to be elected, you need to meet a certain criteria set by the government.
And this time, the government changed the criteria.
There are a few political parties in Hong Kong, one of them being the Democratic Party, who really tries to fight for Hongkongers' democracy and freedom.
As you may have guessed, the requirement changes was targetted towards them (note: I'm biased). Only one of their members managed to meet the requirements.
Meanwhile, there is another pro-government party (might as well call them pro-Beijing) called DAB (Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong).
A few dozens of their members managed to get into the election.
This situation is what we call in Cantonese, "揀爛橙", which means "choosing rotten oranges".
However, Hongkongers do yearn for democracy and freedom, thanks to the protests a few years back (Anti Extradition Law, Umbrella Movement). Those have made us become aware of our declining democracy. That's the reason why a lot of people casted their votes in 2019. Today, in 2023, a lot of people spotted what the government was trying to achieve with the requirement changes, and therefore understood that, it is meaningless to vote in the election this time. So they just stopped voting.
Despite already knowing that nobody is interested in voting, the government still tried to do a lot of promotions about the election to get us to vote.
Almost every time there is an ad-break on TV, they would advertise at least once about the election.
The government also setup boundary voting stations, to try to get citizens who go to mainland on election day to vote.
They said there are only 30,000 slots for registration. The final amount of registrations was only 3,000. Some people didn't even show up.
One day before the election, the government also teamed up with all the TV broadcaster for a live concert to try to get people to cast their votes.
Well, we know the result.
They have wasted so much money to achieve nothing. Mind you that none of these were there last time.
Yesterday, on radio, a governement member was interviewed. The reported asked them their opinion about the low vote rate.
They answered, "We're not here for numbers," which is the most hilarious response of this all because the purpose of the promotions was totally trying to get people to vote.