Poll chief refuses to quit his 'tough job'
Hong Kong's election chief yesterday blamed a system design flaw for confusion over voter turnout in the chaotic September polls as he again dismissed calls for his resignation.
Mr Justice Woo Kwok-hing said one of the election's main problems was a 'shortfall' in the design of the Interactive Voice Response System that should have reported cumulative hourly turnout figures from the 501 polling stations.
Releasing his final report on the Legco polls, the Electoral Affairs Commission chairman said the government was seeking legal advice on whether it could claim compensation from the contractor that set up the system.
But he also said the Registration and Electoral Office could have been 'more proactive' in supervising the contractor.
The system was unable to handle electronic calls from so many stations at once and much of the data had to be input manually.
This led to complaints that the votes cast did not tally with turnout figures in the functional constituencies and caused a five-hour delay in releasing the overall turnout figure.
Mr Justice Woo said there were no contingency plans to cope with such failures. He stressed again, however, that the integrity of the election system was not affected.
He brushed aside calls for his resignation to accept responsibility for the problems, saying nobody in Hong Kong understood elections better than him.
The unpaid job was a tough one, he added.
'If we do not continue, then who will? We have to take responsibility and cannot just quit - I can tell you resolutely that I am not going to quit.'
Meanwhile, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa announced four appointments to an independent committee of experts to 'review the management, planning and conduct of elections, and to make recommendations for improvement'.
But Mr Tung said of the concluding report: 'The findings of the final report affirm that the integrity of the election has not been affected.'
The experts are Daniel Tse Chi-wai, president emeritus of Hong Kong Baptist University; Herbert Tsoi Hak-kong, former Law Society president; Philip Chen Nan-lok, director and chief operating officer of Cathay Pacific; and Daniel Lai, the MTR Corporation's head of information technology.
