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Articles: electoral reform

Election disclosures

Webb on "Backchat" re David Li
RTHK, 19-Feb-08

David Li Kwok Po resigns from Executive Council
HK Government, 8pm 16-Feb-08

Letter to Donald Tsang
Webb-site.com editor David Webb has written to Hong Kong's Chief Executive with the results of our opinion poll on whether David Li Kwok Po should leave the Executive Council. (15-Feb-08)

Resign, Mr Li
Early today HK time, avoiding local press coverage, the US SEC announced David Li's HK$63.2m settlement of charges of insider tipping  in the Dow Jones case. We call on him to do the honourable thing and resign as a member of Hong Kong's cabinet and legislature. (6-Feb-08)

Listen to Donald Tsang on democracy and the Cultural Revolution
RTHK, 12-Oct-07
His apology, 13-Oct-07

A by-election in HK
We take a look ahead to the forthcoming by-election in Hong Kong, and marvel at the hypocrisy of the DAB and Regina Ip. (31-Aug-07)

Complaint to the Ombudsman
Webb-site.com editor David Webb has filed this complaint with the Ombudsman regarding the black-out of addresses of individual election donors, which makes it impossible to identify many of them by their incomplete or non-unique names alone. (8-May-07)

Don's Donations
Webb-site.com discovers a Government black-out on details of political donations, breaking its own law and making it difficult to identify individual donors who financed Donald Tsang's campaign in the recent pseudo-election. Despite this, by careful analysis we have been able to estimate who were the leading donors, several of whom used dozens of unlisted subsidiaries or obscure executives to mask the scale of their contributions. We call for campaign finance reform to cap individual donations and ban corporate sponsorship. (7-May-07)

20% of 70 is not 12
A little-noticed provision of the Government's constitutional proposals seeks to contravene the Basic Law by restricting the percentage of legislators who can hold right of foreign abode to less than that provided by the Basic Law. If the proposal proceeds into local law, then we will consider bringing a judicial review. Ironically, when it suits them, the Government proposes a percentage nomination criterion for the Chief Executive rather than the absolute number in the Basic Law. (30-Nov-05)

Corporate Voting in HK Elections
In our first article leading up to the march for universal suffrage on Sunday, we look at the failure of HK's Government to abolish the small-circle corporate voting system which secures business dominance of the Functional Constituencies and a veto in LegCo. We illustrate it with an investigation of the Transport constituency electorate. (28-Nov-05)

One Vote, Wrong System
Webb-site.com takes a close look at the unfair form of proportional representation practiced in Hong Kong's geographic constituencies. As we will show, the devil is in the details, which mathematically favour short lists, 1-person lists and lunatics. The system also excludes candidate choice within parties and wastes a lot of votes. We make several proposals for electoral reform, the best of which would be a Single Transferable Vote system. (24-Sep-04)

Why you should march for democracy
If you are a market professional or investor, wavering on whether to join the march for democracy on July 1st, and wondering whether it is a waste of time, then this article is for you. The choice you make now will affect the future prosperity of Hong Kong. (25-Jun-04)

March for your Rights on July 1
We're getting to the root of Hong Kong's governance problems - Webb-site.com urges all investors and market professionals to join the 1-July march, the background to which is as much about the need for universal suffrage under Article 45 as it is about state security under Article 23. (30-Jun-03)

2007 & HK's Future
Your editor addressed the Legislative Council's Constitutional Affairs Panel today, on the question of universal suffrage for the election of Hong Kong's Chief Executive in 2007. We urged the Government to stop dragging its feet and implement a free market in policy-makers through the ballot box. (16-Jun-03)