Hong Kong elections: pollster group moves ahead with survey on voter sentiment for Legco race, drops popularity rankings
- The Public Opinion Research Institute will on Tuesday announce results of its first-round poll on coming election
- Pro-Beijing lawyers’ group had accused it of inciting voters to cast blank ballots, but legal details on alleged breaches unclear
The Public Opinion Research Institute (Pori) will however not come up with popularity rankings for Legco candidates in the lead-up to next month’s election, citing budget constraints. It will be the first time the agency, founded by Dr Robert Chung Ting-yiu, a former chief pollster at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has dropped the practice since Britain returned the city to China in 1997.
The Hong Kong government had earlier made it a criminal offence for people to encourage voter boycotts of elections, or spoil ballots as a form of protest against Beijing’s shake-up.
On Monday, Chung Kim-wah, deputy head of Pori, told an online talk show his group had proceeded with its plan to conduct three rounds of public opinion polls tracking people’s intention to vote, with results from the first phase to be released on Tuesday.
Respondents were asked about their political stances, and whether they would cast votes or leave their ballot papers blank, he said.
“A simple methodology we’ve adopted is to provide all options to electors … We are not advocating for anyone to cast blank votes,” Chung added. “We know well that [conducting polls] these days can be controversial … but we hope to shoulder our social responsibility as a pollster to conduct surveys in a scientific and democratic way.”