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Press Releases

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Response to media enquiries

     In response to media enquiries, a spokesman for the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau said today (September 9) that:

     "The Government has all along attached importance to voter registration work, and has been striving to strike a balance between the need to ensure the fairness, credibility and accuracy of the voter registration system, and the need to enable and facilitate eligible persons to register as electors and exercise their right to vote.

     To address public concerns over the accuracy of electors' particulars, the Government conducted a review on the voter registration system from late 2011 to March 2012 and consulted the views of the Legislative Council and members of the public. To enhance the credibility of the system and accuracy of the particulars contained in the registers of electors, the Registration and Electoral Office (REO) implemented a series of measures to improve the checking mechanism since early 2012. Such measures included checks on multiple electors or multiple surnames of electors registered with the same residential address, territory-wide random sampling checks and enhanced cross-matching of data with other government departments.

     Starting from the 2015 voter registration cycle, we have extended the entire period for the public to inspect the provisional registers and omission lists and to lodge claims or objections, as well as for the Revising Officer to arrange hearings of claims and objections by 14 days in total. The relevant changes were effected with the passage of the Electoral Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2014 by the Legislative Council in July 2014.

     In response to recent concerns about the accuracy of information in the registers of electors, suspected abuse of the objection mechanism, as well as individual cases of suspected amendment of the particulars of certain electors by third parties with a malicious intent, we and the REO will study how to effectively address these concerns with a view to ensuring that the voter registration system will improve with times."

Ends/Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Issued at HKT 20:45