About 140,000 privileged voters from 31 sub-sectors are eligible on Thursday to return 588 electors for the Election Committee. The exercise has been billed as a prelude to the Legislative Council elections scheduled for May 25. However, it is evident this obscure nomination procedure is doomed to fail.
The 800-member EC is designated to fill 10 of the 60 seats on offer for the inaugural elections of the Legislative Council of the SAR. The committee is composed of representatives from four sectors, which in turn are divided into 38 sub-sectors, which are mostly already represented in the functional constituencies.
The religious groups have already chosen their 40 nominees to the EC, while another 95 have been returned uncontested from four sub-sectors. Seventy-seven members of the Provisional Legislative Council and the local delegation to National People's Congress are declared ex-officio EC members and do not have to go through any voting procedures.
This has left 963 candidates competing for the leftover of 588 seats, or about 1.6 aspirants for each opening. The figure can hardly be described as competitive.
In the Higher Education sub-sector, 27 hopefuls are vying for 20 seats. Several contestants have pledged, strangely enough, to stay away from politics. Instead, they declared they would concentrate only on matters immediately related to the education profession.
One would expect the successful nominees to bear the interests of the whole society in mind, when they exercise their rights to select 10 future legislators.