ThunderGo: Hong Kong law academic launches scheme to encourage strategic election voting
Benny Tai wants to highlight likely winners and losers in the Legislative Council polls in September in a bid to maximise pan-democrat wins through strategic voting
Occupy Central co-founder Benny Tai Yiu-ting has officially launched his “ThunderGo” drive, a bid to getas many pan-democrat candidates as possible into the legislature in the September elections through strategic voting.
A programme, “Votsonar”, has been designed to conduct interactive polls via Telegram, a free instant messaging app.
It will also regularly inform voters about the popularity of candidates in geographical constituencies and the so-called “super seats” involving more than three million voters not eligible to vote in any other functional constituency.
“We want to inform voters which candidates enjoy a higher chance of winning and which have a lower chance, and hope they will concentrate their votes on the former to avoid wasting their ballot papers,” said Tai, an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong.
In 2012, the pan-democrat camp received more than 56 per cent of votes in direct elections, yet failed to secure the number of seats it should have got because of poor coordination among parties.
“We want to call on voters to make better use of their ballots because we could actually kick the Beijing loyalists out of the legislature with good coordination and strategic voting,” Tai said.