March 02, 2007

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Ask not want not

Last night saw the first ever debate between Donald "Shifty Nifty" Tsang and Alan "Don Quioxite" Leong, with Leong being the clear winner and still having no hope of changing anyone's mind. Buried in The Standard's summary of the debate is a perfect symbol of everything that's wrong with the system:

The heated debate took place in front of a live audience of 530 Election Committee members and millions of viewers and listeners on television and radio...A total of 22 questions were raised by committee members, while six were selected at random from questions submitted by the public in advance.
Bear in mind each Election Committee member has or will spend time in one-on-one meetings with the candidates, yet they get to ask the lion share of the questions. Look at it like this: 800 Election Committee members got to ask 22 questions, while almost 7 million Hong Kongers got 6.

This is considered progress.

posted by Simon on 03.02.07 at 09:01 AM in the Hong Kong democracy/politics category.




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Comments:

or, to improve on that algorithm...

800 Election Committee members get to ask 22 questions + EC(x) * 800 = n

with EC being election committee
and x being the number of questions
given that each EC member asks whatever number of questions they want in private

still leaving the public with 6

"Six is the loneliest number..."

posted by: doug on 03.02.07 at 09:50 AM [permalink]

The only problem is that assumes Election Committee members actually ask questions.

posted by: Simon on 03.02.07 at 10:32 AM [permalink]

and that 800 is actually a number, but then we're getting into higher levels of math than i care to elaborate on at this time.

posted by: doug on 03.02.07 at 12:35 PM [permalink]




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