Lawmakers have slammed Hong Kong’s electoral watchdog after two laptops containing data on all the eligible voters in the city went “missing” during the Chief Executive vote on Sunday.
Democratic Party lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting and Civic Party lawmaker Dennis Kwok, who accused the government of attempting to play down the incident, described it as “spooky and ridiculous”.
“Why would you bring information on over 3 million voters to an election which involved only 1,200 people?” Lam told Apple Daily. The Sunday vote, which determined former Chief Secretary Carrie Lam as the city’s next Chief Executive, is only open to a 1,200-person strong election committee.
The Registration and Electoral Office stated that the computers went missing from a locked room with no surveillance cameras at the AsiaWorld-Expo convention centre on Lantau Island. However, Lam Cheuk-ting said the authorities should have revealed more information about the incident to the public, such as the number of people given access to the room.
The lawmaker went on to criticise the government for saying that there was no evidence of the voters’ personal information being leaked. “The whole computer is gone, all the data of some 3 million voters is gone. We don’t have to wait for the thieves to upload all the information to the internet to know it has been leaked,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kwok questioned why such important data would be stored in a room without any guards, SCMP reports. He previously sent a letter to Legislative Council President Andrew Leung calling for a special inquiry meeting over the incident, but had his request rejected on the grounds of it not being a matter of “public interest”. Because obviously the personal data of every voter in Hong Kong has nothing to do with the Hong Kong public. Top logic, Leung.
Lam said he had not been given a chance to talk to the chief electoral officer, adding the government’s reluctance to cooperate had made it difficult to monitor the situation. He and Kwok vowed to keep pushing the authorities to come clean on the matter.
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