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7. A number of disadvantages of option (a) are listed in the
ExCo memorandum. To these could be added the point that
functional constituency voters would under this arrangement have
3 votes which would be very unwelcome to the liberals. The
point was also made in ExCo that this option would infringe the
principle of non duplication. I wonder. I note that the precise wording of this principle from the 1990 exchanges is as follows:
"The composition of the Election Committee should be designed, as
far as possible to avoid direct duplication with the membership
of other constituencies returning members of the legislator" (my underlining). Under option (a), the composition of the Election Committee would not directly duplicate any of the constituencies electing other members of LegCo. Indeed if the functional constituency voters were allowed to choose members of the
Election Committee from beyond their functional constituency, there would be no duplication at all. In short, I think that if we decided to go down this route, the non-duplication point need
not be an obstacle.
8.
There is one other argument for an Election Committee based as closely as possible on the BL model, which is not mentioned in the ExCo paper.
This is the point developed by Nigel Cox in his letter of 14 August last year to Peter Lai: namely that if
we could devise and enshrine in electoral law a method for
forming the Election Committee which corresponded fairly closely
to that in the BL, the Chinese would have quite an incentive to
use that law to produce the 1999 Election Committee (electing 6 members of LegCo) and the 2002 Election Committee (electing the
second Chief Executive). Of course there are no guarantees that
they would do so, but if we had solved the tricky problems of translating the vague BL model into a credible set of electoral arrangements, there would be some chance at least that they would adopt it.
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