Universal_Suffrage_in_Hk

First of all, let’s look into Hong Kong’s present Legislative Council. 30 (half) of the seats are occupied by functional constituencies while the other half are taken by geographical constituencies. For the geographical constituencies, the representatives are elected by all Hong Kong citizens, each person has one vote to choose the person to represent their district. The representatives in the Legco should express the citizens ideas and wills in meetings held with the Chief Executive, therefore it is important for citizens to choose who they would like to represent them. People will choose representatives base on their reputation, education, promoted ideas and promises made that they claim to express after the election. This is very fair as all eligible citizens have their rights to vote for whom to represent them. However, functional constituencies are only voted by people who have jobs. For example, teachers can vote for the education constituency, while taxi drivers can vote for transport constituency. If one is running different businesses, one will have more than one vote. Then some people might have many votes, while some (such as housewives) have only one. This is not fair to the ones who have only one vote. It was once shown on the television that during a meeting held in the Legco, Timothy Fok, representative of the Sports functional constituency didn’t even know where his own seat was. It means that the functional constituency members are always missing the meetings. They only appear when certain issues involve their industry. They are not aware of social affairs of Hong Kong but are taking seats in the Legco to represent Hong Kong people’s ideas! But why don’t they care' It is because many of the representatives, such as Timothy mentioned above have very few competitors to compete for the job of being the representative and they only obtain very few votes from people who participate in the election in their industries as not many people work for that industry. It is not rare to see people becoming elected automatically as there isn’t any competence in the industry. So why care for their jobs here to represent people' They won’t lose their jobs even they don’t act as enthusiastic as those geographical constituencies. Under this unfair situation, people require universal suffrage, meaning that all eligible voters have only one vote to choose their representative. Under this fair rule, there are more useful members in the Legco. They can represent us and reflect everyone’s ideas.