Low turnout at Hong Kong by-election spooks democrats as they vie to reclaim four lost seats

Hong Kong voters went to the polls on Sunday less than a year and a half after last doing so, casting ballots in legislative by-elections that gave opposition supporters a chance to recapture four out of six seats lost in a political fracas that drew the line on the kind of candidate deemed acceptable by Beijing.

But whether the pan-democrats could make a comeback remained uncertain late on Sunday night, as vote counting continued amid a lukewarm turnout for the three directly elected seats. As the voting closed at 10.30pm on Sunday, 904,000 of the 2.1 million registered voters in the four constituencies had cast their ballots, and the voter turnout rate was 43 per cent. In the Legco’s general election in 2016, the turnout rate was 58.3 per cent.

Analysts contacted by the Post warned that a low turnout could signal a pan-democratic failure to win over pro-independence localists, which would risk splintering the camp in the long run. 

Hours before the closing of polling booths, candidates from the two major rival camps were making emergency appeals to galvanise voters into action. Both sides claimed a low turnout was not in their favour, despite the conventional belief it would hit the pan-democrats more.

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Gary Fan Kwok-wai, who was chosen to represent the pan-democrats to run in the New Territories East constituency, warned: “If the turnout is less than 40 per cent, I can almost say for sure, all four candidates of the pro-democracy camp will be wiped out.”