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Following is the transcript (English portion) of the briefing by the Chief Secretary for Administration, Mrs Anson Chan, after visiting the Statistical Information and Press Centre of the 2000 LegCo Election Committee Subsector Elections at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre today (July 9):
Chief Secretary : I have just been to and inspected the polling station and the arrangements and I have looked at the statistics. If we judged it on the basis of the hourly voting rate, then over 6,000 registered voters have already cast their votes, which is a better record than the 1998 Elections. After this, of course, to make sure that the elections take place in a fair, open and transparent manner, we have an independent Election Committee to make sure that this is so. This year's arrangements have also been made with a view to facilitating voters to cast their votes. So for example, the voting day this year is on Sunday and we have 100 polling stations all over Hong Kong and Kowloon to facilitate, again, voting. So, I do urge all the registered voters to turn out and vote for their representatives.
Reporter: Mrs Chan, has there been any complaint of voting irregularity so far?
Chief Secretary: No, I don't think we have had any complaints.
Reporter: Mrs Chan. Thousands of civil servants will be marching this afternoon. Do you have any comments ?
Chief Secretary: We have many established channels to communicate with our staff and these channels have been around for a long time and they have proved on the whole very effective. So, of course, I hope that civil service staff unions will use these established channels to communicate with us. And as you know last week, the Chief Executive and myself, and the Secretary for Civil Service, met with the representatives of four major staff unions to understand their concerns. But, that's it. In an open and pluralistic society, civil servants, like any other citizen, can choose their methods of expressing their views, provided they complied with the law.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript)
End/Sunday, July 9, 2000
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