Not only have Mr Justice Barnabas Fung Wah and his colleagues at the Electoral Affairs Commission been found sleeping on the job, but it is also proving astonishingly difficult to rouse them from their slumber.
As news trickled and then streamed out about suspicious irregularities in the registration of voters, followed by a slew of arrests, the commission did nothing until, on November 30, it issued a statement saying no discrepancies were found on the Northern District electoral register. It later said it had sent out 674 letters inquiring about other registrations and had received responses from 104 confirming they are bona fide voters. There is a sense here of an organisation determined to find that nothing has gone wrong. At the least, why is this alleged watchdog so determined not to watch?
Let's be clear about the commission's responsibilities. Its terms of reference are unambiguous: it is responsible 'for the conduct and supervision of elections' and 'the registration of electors'. So why has it slumbered while action was being taken by the local media, in its watchdog role, alongside the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the police in their law enforcement roles?
Fung, meanwhile, has summoned the television cameras to observe him pottering through empty polling stations casting dummy votes, presumably to indicate that everything is ready for the Election Committee polls tomorrow. He has also, finally, suggested there might be some problem with the self-declaration system of voter registration.
However, suspicion that this system was flawed and that abuse was taking place emerged well before the recent district council elections. Fung and his colleagues at the commission, senior counsel Lawrence Lok Ying-kam and academic marketing specialist Andrew Chan Chi-fai, however, preferred to spend their pre-election time dreaming up a crazy plan to try to regulate election coverage on the internet, by insisting that internet channels give equal time to all candidates. As the avalanche of ridicule advanced, they were forced to abandon this ludicrous idea.
This tiny group of government trustees is unaware that the World Wide Web might be hard to control from a little office in Hong Kong.