General Audit Committee validates 24 more votes, no impact on results

The president of the General Audit Committee for the Legislative Assembly (AL) Election, Cheong Kuok Chi, said that after the final audit of the votes, the committee decided to validate an additional 24 preliminarily invalid votes in last Sunday’s polling.

In a press briefing yesterday at the Public Administration Building, Cheong said, “Eight contested votes and 16 null votes have been changed from invalid to valid.”

The procedure did not affect the preliminary results announced in the early hours of Monday.

With the procedure, the results of the AL election are now final and have been published in the lobby of the Public Administration Building.

Questioned by the media about the high number of null votes in this election, Cheong said that he is not in a position to judge or evaluate whether the null vote figures are high. He noted that his duty, and that of the committee he presides over, is to ensure the legality of all procedures and the fairness of the results.

Regarding the reason for the invalidation of over 7,000 votes, Cheong said there are various reasons, but he would not elaborate due to his duty to maintain voter secrecy.

He also used the same justification to explain why, contrary to previous elections, the work of judging the validity of votes was not open to the media this time.

“We don’t know what the ballots contain until we open them, and so, taking into account our duty to keep votes confidential, this work was done in the presence of the members of the committee and representatives of the candidate lists,” Cheong responded to media inquiries.

This work has been open to the media in previous editions of the AL elections. During the audit of the AL election votes in 2021, the public learned that, in many cases, voters expressed their frustration by using the stamp provided to write the Chinese word “No” and several profanities in both Chinese and English.

In other cases, the General Audit Committee at the time displayed ballots stamped with patterns or drawings, or simply filled all the squares of the lists running in the elections.

This time, Cheong refused to elaborate on whether such cases were recurring.

Blank and null votes comprised over 7% of the total ballots cast in the election, which is widely recognized as representing a protest vote.

According to a study by Priscilla Lewis Southwell and Marcy Jean Everest, published in 1998 in the Social Science Journal and titled “The Electoral Consequences of Alienation: Nonvoting and Protest Voting in the 1992 Presidential Race,” these votes, except for a small number of potential mistakes, are generally used to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the choice of candidates or the political system.

They are considered more relevant than abstention because these votes are counted and require processing.

They also involve an intentional act by the voters to go through the polling procedure, effectively participating in the election, although choosing not to make their vote count in favor of any candidate or group.