• First primary election held in Hong Kong

• Establish a precedence for future

elections and possible territory-wide

opinion polls/referendums

• First large-scale e-voting or e-polling

system in Hong Kong

• Polling held on January 8, 2012 in 74

polling stations from 10am to 7pm

• Results were announced to public at 8pm

• Results

– Total number of voters voted: 33,932

– Votes for Mr Albert Chun-Yan Ho

(#1): 22,148 (67.24%)

– Votes for Mr Frederick Fung Kin-kee

(#2): 10,791 (32.76%)

– Abstain: 993 (2.93%)

泛民初選投票結果

05,00010,00015,00020,00025,00030,00035,000

11:00 12:00 13:00 14:00 15:00 16:00 17:00 18:00 19:00 時間

總投

票數

總投票數 每小時票差

Pan-dem CE Primary Election Results

Total number of votes

(Accumulative)

Total no. of votes (Hourly)

Voting Trend (Hourly)

Time

• Onsite staff verifies the

HKID card of voter

– Required to be permanent

resident over 18 years of

age

• Staff enters full HKID

card number to system

– HKID# is hashed to a unique,

irreversible string to be

stored in database to be

compared against duplicate

voting

• Soft keypad used to

prevent keylogging

• Notebook/iPad passed to

voter to vote

• Voter votes for his/her

desired CE candidate

• Press “Vote” and the

voting process is

completed

• The whole voting

process can be

completed in less than

1 min.

• E-voting with real-time monitoring

• Internet Web-based system, with voting

over ~400 notebooks/tablets, supplied

by student volunteers

• Multi-layered security measures to

ensure privacy and against hacking

attempts

• No need for vote counting

• Programming

– Cryptographic algorithm to counter Rainbow

Table attacks

– Web infrastructure design and optimization

• Cloud-based backup for database server for

failover on AWS (Amazon Web Service)

– Real-time vote casting, automated vote counts

and verification

• Website for information and promotion

– www.pdce-primary.hk

• Access control – important as we used “public computers”

– Unique one-time login/passwords/URL combination (sent by SMS to staff on

the morning of election day)

– Soft keypad against keylogging

• DDoS mitigation design

– Used CloudFlare (content delivery network used as cloud-based firewall) –

over the 9 hours operation (although the web address was not announced

until the morning of the operation):

• 18% of traffic were external attacks from outside Hong Kong

• 29 phishing websites found

• SSL encryption to prevent against man-in-the-middle attack

• All data (including hashed data) removed on the evening on voting

day

• Report provided to Privacy Commissioner’s Office after primary

election day

• Point/touch-and-click --

easy to use for voters,

no training required

– Can be completed in < 1

minute

• Voting demonstration

video on website and

YouTube

• Real-time vote

counting/verification

• 74 voting locations

around Hong Kong

• First primary in Hong Kong, setting precedence for

2017 CE direct election and beyond

• 33,932 Hong Kong permanent residents voted

– 3,772 per hour

– Voting open only until 7pm

• Cost effectiveness

– E.g. 2010 Legco by-election cost ~$300M with 559,966

people voted, i.e. <$500 per vote

– Total expense of this by-election = $0.5M, i.e. <$15

per vote (more than 30 times more economical!)

• First public e-voting in Hong Kong

• Infrastructure design against attacks

and privacy concerns

• Scalable and expandable

• Real-time

• Using system design to overcome resource

constraints such as availability of

notebooks/tablets

• Promote public engagement

• Future reference model

– E.g. HKU POP’s POPvote (March 23,

2012)

• Environmental friendly

– No paper voting

• Charles Mok, member, Pan-democrat CE Primary

Election Organizing Committee; Chair, The

Professional Commons; Director, Computancy

Limited

• Ben Cheng, System Architect, Oursky Limited

• Kenneth Lam, System Architect, 3TECH

Engineering Limited

• Jason Leung, Project Coordinator, Computancy

Limited

• Sang Young, CISSP – Security team leader

• Charles Mok, Honorary

President, HKITF; various

judging capacity for Hong Kong

ICT Awards 2012

• Other team members

– SC Leung, HKPC/HKCERT

• Contact

Kimching Chan, The Professional

Commons

kimching@procommons.org.hk