“We have stepped up our manpower for vote counting to make sure the process will be smooth and fast,” he said, following a visit to the main polling station at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.

Police said on their Facebook page they would step up operations for the election, deploying their airport security unit, counterterrorism response unit and railway response team to stage “high-profile anti-terrorism patrols”.

Hong Kong’s John Lee vows to build city into vibrant metropolis at final rally

The main polling station will be open from 9am to 11.30am, with voters to be given only the option on the ballot paper of “support” or “not support” as there is no second candidate.

Lee, a former policeman turned bureaucrat, needs 750 votes to win. But having already collected 786 nominations from Election Committee members to run in the poll, his victory is all but guaranteed.

His election campaign chief, political heavyweight Tam Yiu-chung, said that while he was not aware of whether Lee had made any calls, such a move was “reasonable”.

“People won’t blame you for being too courteous,” he said.

Tik Chi-yuen, the city’s only non-pro-establishment lawmaker, said he would vote for Lee despite his dissatisfaction with the “vagueness” of his manifesto. He said his Third Side party believed if they opposed it, it would only cause “more damage” to Hong Kong.

Incumbent leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor also visited the convention centre on Saturday and inspected the polling station and central counting station.

Stacking up John Lee’s election rally against those of other Hong Kong candidates

She was accompanied by constitutional and mainland affairs minister Erick Tsang Kwok-wai.

“I have full confidence in the election of the sixth chief executive. We should not take it lightly, sometimes there are situations where some mistakes will be made when we think it’s all going to be smooth,” Lam told electoral staff.

Electoral officials will be desperate to avoid a repeat of embarrassing delays last year when it took 14 hours for officers to count about 4,380 votes in the race for places on the Election Committee. Subsequent investigations found document delivery, cross-checking of ballots and paper jams in vote-counting machines contributed to the hiccups.

Sunday’s election will be the first for the chief executive since Beijing overhauled Hong Kong’s electoral system last year to ensure only “patriots” are in charge.

On Friday, Lee held a carefully staged election rally before an audience of nearly 1,500 people, including district representatives, political heavyweights and business leaders, and pledged to restore hope, strengthen the city’s international status as a financial hub, and turn it into a vibrant metropolis over the next five years.

The former chief secretary, 64, also offered a rare glimpse into his upbringing, recounting how his family shared their television with neighbours in their small public housing flat and his experience of being robbed while living on an estate.

His election team, meanwhile, defended the rally’s theme – “We and Us: A New Chapter for Hong Kong” – in a Facebook post on Saturday after being challenged on the grammatical soundness and the accuracy of translation of the first part of the slogan. In the Chinese version, the literal translation is “I and Us”.

The team said it wished to express the meaning of “we and us”, although it was not possible in Chinese because there was no difference between subject and object pronouns, meaning it would become “we and we”. So the Chinese version was “I and Us” instead.

Lee said the campaign team believed the communicative meaning of the phrase was more important than its literal translation.

“We would like to express the meaning of everyone coming together and there is no distinction between you and me,” he said in Chinese, adding that the campaign team had repeatedly discussed the issue.

He said people should respect differences between each other to make society inclusive. “Insisting on their own thoughts and not accepting others’ opinions will bring a lot of conflicts to society. It’s worth reflecting on,” he wrote.

The slogan sparked discussion online after it first appeared at Friday’s rally. Lee also took some flak earlier in the week after calling his alma mater “mother secondary school” when answering an English question in a media stand up on Tuesday.

In his manifesto, released a little over a week before Sunday’s vote, Lee vowed to focus on tackling chronic housing problems and building a caring society, while maintaining the city’s competitiveness over the next five years.

He also promised a “result-oriented” approach to improve governance, and make reopening the borders with mainland China and the rest of the world a priority if elected.

Over the course of the past month, Lee has spent time meeting people from various sectors, including foreign business chambers, doctors, district representatives and those involved in the art and culture scene.

He also paid short visits to two families living in subdivided flats and to a wet market in Tin Shui Wai.