XN000022-1995-06-20 — Page 2

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Government pleased with voter registration figures

The Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, Mr Nicholas Ng, today (Tuesday) congratulated the Boundary and Election Commission (BEC) for a highly successful voter registration exercise.

He also urged all registered electors to vote in the elections on September 17, which will return Hong Kong's first fully elected Legislative Council.

Mr Ng pointed out that more people than ever now had the right to vote in the elections as the voter registration figures released by the BEC showed increases in the electorate for both the functional and the geographical constituencies.

"For the nine new functional constituencies alone, over 1.05 million people have signed up.

"This is extremely good, bearing in mind in particular that these constituencies are newly created and that we are building up the franchise from scratch. It is a big step forward in giving our working population a second vote," he said.

Mr Ng said the result was also very encouraging for the other 21 old functional constituencies.

"For the 10 functional constituencies representing the professional sectors, there are more electors in every one of them. There are now a total of some 72,000 electors in these constituencies, an increase of more than 9,000 people, or 14 per cent.

"For the other 11 functional constituencies where individual electors have replaced corporate electors, the total electorate has increased from 8,325 to some 10,000. This represents a 22 per cent growth," he said.

With all the functional constituencies added together, Mr Ng said there were now more than 1.13 million electors, which represent a 15-fold increase compared with the functional constituency electorate in the 1991 Legislative Council elections.

The geographical constituencies also recorded a net increase in electors, from 2.45 million to some 2.56 million.

"This follows the entry of 229,000 new names on the General Electoral Roll and the deletion of about 114,000 out-dated ones," Mr Ng explained.