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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 1985
Parts VI and VII deal
respectively with the appointment of returning officers, the supervision of elections and with election petitions. They repeat, generally, the provisions already contained in
contained in the legislation dealing with Urban Council and District Board elections. Finally, Part VIII Covers a number of miscellaneous matters, including the very important requirement that voting shall be in secret.
Sir, I mentioned earlier the intention to use the absolute majority system in the determination of election results. This system is proposed, rather than the simple majority procedure currently used in the Urban Council and District Board elections and certainly will be used for the Regional Council elections. An absolute majority system is a more effective way of ensuring the election of candidates with a large degree of consensus support in the electoral college and functional constituencies. The detailed procedures will be spelt out in the subsidiary regulations to be made under the Bill, but, in essence,
In essence, the system
the system is designed to provide that no candidate may be declared elected until he has secured more than 50% of the votes cast in the election.
In the case of the electoral college constituencies, where the numbers of voters will be relatively small, it is proposed to adopt a system of repeated ballots, whereby voting is continued through a series of ballots until one candidate secures an absolute majority of the votes cast. In the case of functional constituencies, where there will be greater numbers of voters, it is proposed to adopt a preferential voting system under which electors record their votes for the candidates in order of preference. This system calls for repeated counts of the votes, with lower preference votes being added at each the first preference votes. The candidate securing the lowest number of votes on each count is eliminated, until a single candidate emerges with the support of more than 50% of the voters. It is to accommodate this procedure that the labour functional constituency has been divided into two
count
electoral divisions.