Hong Kong election authorities under fire over system failure disruption to district council poll, as parties demand answers
- Political leaders Regina Ip, Stanley Ng and Priscilla Leung hit out at glitch that prompted extension of voting hours, saying candidates have been affected
- Electoral watchdog chairman David Lok apologises in emotional press briefing, says he is willing to take responsibility for blunder, with John Lee vowing investigation
Hong Kong election authorities have come under fire over a system failure that briefly interrupted Sunday’s district council poll, with pro-establishment parties demanding answers and insisting their candidates have been affected, and other critics questioning the decision to extend voting hours.
Electoral Affairs Commission chairman Mr Justice David Lok Kai-hong apologised to candidates, campaign teams and voters at an emotional press briefing on Monday morning, saying he was willing to take responsibility for the blunder.
“Despite the incident, I hope everyone will not neglect the effort put in by our staff,” he said, choking up as he spoke. “I feel guilty towards our staff who stood fast in their posts.
“On the criteria that the election is fair, honest and accurate, I would say this election was largely successful.”
Lok said the commission would face all criticism seriously, but rejected claims polling hours were extended to boost the turnout rate.
“This is a difficult decision to make, we have never thought about increasing voting rates,” Lok said, referring to the call to extend voting hours. “If we resorted to that, it would have been really a failure.”
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According to the electoral watchdog, the electronic voter registration system started experiencing problems at 7.42pm, which prevented ballot papers from being issued. Polling stations started using the printed copy of the electoral roll to issue ballots under a contingency plan.
Lok said the hiccup was unexpected as the system had passed a three-tier certification, and insisted a 90-minute polling extension was necessary to allow voters who had headed home after learning about the glitch to cast their ballots.
He said a task force would investigate and report their findings to the chief executive within three months, adding that he was willing to take responsibility for the incident.
In the early hours of Monday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said he was “highly concerned” about the failure and that a task force led by Senior Counsel Bernard Man, the Electoral Affairs Commission and police would be set up to investigate the cause.
Anthony Lai Cheuk-tung, a malware analyst and security incident responder at cybersecurity firm VX Research, said the glitch could have been caused by an internal error due to insufficient stress testing.
“Moving servers or upgrading their program can cause databases to be out of sync. Once the information is out of sync, it is easy for databases to be corrupted, display errors and the whole system will fail to run,” he said.
Lai said such synchronisation errors could be serious in nature, requiring a restart of the system or a reboot to import all the data again.
“It cannot be fixed in a short period of time, it is not that simple,” he said.
Lai ruled out the possibility a cyberattack had occurred as he could still access the voter registration website when the system was down on Sunday, signalling the error was a back-end issue.
Several pro-establishment parties were also up in arms about the glitch, claiming the results would be affected and demanding a clear explanation from the government.
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New People’s Party chairwoman Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said the system failure had deterred evening voters.
“Our supporters on Hong Kong Island tend to be middle class, and it’s difficult to mobilise them late at night, particularly when it is raining,” she said.
“For example, in Mid-Levels along the [escalator], we saw a lot of people coming home with food, market vegetables, going home to cook – they won’t come back after the system glitch. So the system glitch no doubt affected us.”
Stanley Ng Chau-pei, president of the Federation of Trade Unions, said the malfunction resulted in long queues at polling stations, which put off voters.
“This has caused a huge impact on their desire to vote, which is hard to compensate for,” Ng said. “The government has to explain clearly why this happened.”
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Lawmaker Priscilla Leung Mei-fun of the Business and Professionals Alliance for Hong Kong, which fielded 10 candidates in the election, said about 200 voters left a polling station in Shek Kip Mei during the system failure and fewer than 20 returned later to cast their ballots.
Asked about the possibility of legal issues arising from the system glitch, Leung said the case would have to be thoroughly examined, and that the party would need to discuss how to proceed.
Gary Chan Hak-kan, the chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, said the system failure probably had some effect on voters of every political party but the electoral watchdog had done its best to implement the contingency plan.
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The electronic registration system allows polling station staff to access the government database remotely to verify voter identities before issuing ballot papers.
Tony Wong Chi-kwong, the government’s chief information officer, on Sunday said abnormalities in the back-end database of the system had caused delays in data inquiries from all polling stations.
He said the overall network was functioning normally and no unusually high data flows or signs of system attacks were recorded.
The electoral watchdog also sought to reassure residents that no duplicate voting would occur as the polling station computer systems recorded the data of those who had already cast their ballots.
The glitch also delayed the release of the final turnout for nine hours, until 7.40am on Monday.
A government insider said that after the system was switched to manual vote-counting because of the technical problem, it took “much longer” for the results to be uploaded to the data centre and audited before being released to the public.
“The time lapse in counting made it meaningless for us to release an hourly turnout even after the system was repaired on Sunday night,” the source said.
Additional reporting by Connor Mycroft and Harvey Kong
