With the 2021 Legislative Council General Election coming up this Sunday (19 December 2021), Mr Ricky CHU Man-kin, Chairperson of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) visited a mock polling station today (14 December 2021) to review the facilitation measures for electors with special needs.

As in previous elections, the Registration and Electoral Office (REO) has put in place a number of measures to facilitate electors with special needs to exercise their right to vote in the coming Election. In particular, a new facilitation measure has been introduced this year which gives priority to electors aged 70 or over, pregnant women, and those unable to queue for a long time or have difficulties in queuing due to illness, injury, disability or dependence on mobility aids.

Mr Chu said after visiting the mock polling station at North Point Community Hall, “We are pleased to have this new special arrangement for these groups of people. We believe that the queue especially set up for them to obtain their ballot papers from the ballot paper issuing desk will definitely benefit those who may require more assistance and ensure their voting rights will be exercised equally.”

Besides the special queue arrangement, a new measure will also be implemented to facilitate electors with visual impairment. Magnifying glasses will be made available in polling stations to facilitate the viewing of display of the elector’s tablet of the Electronic Poll Register System at the issuing desks.

To facilitate non-ethnic Chinese voters, electoral information in eight languages of diverse races (Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese and Urdu) will be available on the dedicated website. The version in Vietnamese is added this year.

In addition, some facilitation measures will continue to be implemented to assist electors in need to vote this year such as accessible polling stations with enlarged voting compartments and lower polling tables, pictorial voting aid explaining the voting procedures and braille voting templates to facilitate the marking of ballot papers, etc.

As the statutory organisation tasked with the elimination of discrimination and promotion of equal opportunities, the EOC attaches great importance to the right of all to equal participation in public affairs. The EOC considers that all eligible voters, irrespective of their gender, race or whether they have disabilities or not, are entitled to exercise their equal rights to vote. “We have witnessed the efforts of the REO to engage persons with disabilities or from different ethnic backgrounds at the election. The facilitation measures help safeguard their equal voting rights and it is important that they will not be deprived of their rights due to inaccessible polling stations or language barriers,” Mr Chu said.

Mr Chu continued, “Although the Government has adopted a number of measures to facilitate electors with special needs to cast their votes, we still find that only some of the candidates have provided a text version in both Chinese and English version of their electoral messages. As at 1 December 2021, around 51% and 79% candidates in the Geographical Constituencies and Functional Constituencies still have not provided text versions of their Chinese electoral messages respectively, while around 74% and 68% of the candidates in the Geographic Constituencies and Functional Constituencies still have not provided English electoral message respectively. We appeal to the candidates to try their best making these versions available to voters with visual impairment or who do not read Chinese so as to let them learn more about the vision of the candidates.”

The EOC calls on relevant parties to provide assistance to people with disabilities, from different ethnic backgrounds or with special needs as far as practicable. This will enable them to participate in the election and exercise their civil and political rights.

Besides the above-mentioned facilitation measures, there are a series of measures provided to electors with special needs to facilitate their voting. For details, please refer to the following document:
https://www.eoc.org.hk/Upload/files/Image/LCGE/Facilitation%20measures_Eng.pdf

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Equal Opportunities Commission
14 December 2021