I was mildly encouraged by the results of the LegCo elections (as already covered by Phil, Simon and others). The turnout was up, and considering that this was election to select an opposition rather than a government it was amazing that so many people bothered to turn out. If you compare the turnout on Sunday with that in the elections for the European Parliament, a figure in excess of 50% is actually remarkably high, all things considered.

Overall, the results make sense to me - they reflect the diversity of opinions held by Hong Kong people in a way that a landslide for the pro-democracy parties wouldn't have done. It doesn't mean that Hong Kong people don't want democracy, but it does demonstrate that the Democratic Party can't take votes for granted. There's something of an irony here in that a landslide for the democrats would have alarmed Beijing and probably made it less likely that the system would be made more democratic anytime soon.

Instead, the Liberal Party succesfully make the leap from Functional Constituencies to Geographical Constituencies (winning a seat each in NT East & West), and Rita Fan comfortably won a seat on HK Island. With the democrats making some gains in the Functional Constituencies, we seem to be moving away from the old setup whereby the democrats dominated in the popular vote and the pro-Beijing parties dominated in the rotten boroughs.

Conrad was horrified by the result in NT East:

Irresponsible provocateur "Long Hair'' Leung Kwok-hung, of the April 5th Action Group, and the reptilian James Tien, of the Liberal Party, both won seats in the New Territories East constituency, demonstrating that at least one part of Hong Kong really isn't ready for democracy.

Conrad seems not to understand that one of the joys of a democratic system is that produces results that may not make any sense to intelligent people like him. He couldn't understand how the Spanish people could tip out a centre-right government that had ignored overwhelming public opinion on Iraq and then lied about who had planted the Madrid bombs. People, eh! What's the matter with them? Clearly we need a panel of sensible people to arbitrate on this and anyone who refuses to vote sensibly will lose the right to vote. Same idea as the Election Committee to choose the Chief Executive, I guess.

Or to put it another way - Conrad, get a grip, man!

The democrats really should have capitalised on the frustration felt by many people about the refusal of Beijing to allow more democracy, but for a variety of reasons they failed to do so. Personally, I don't think it was smart of Martin Lee to go to the US and say what he did, or for Emily Lau to go to Taiwan and shout her mouth off. The scandals that affected the Democrats during the campaign didn't help, and then we had the fiasco of Martin Lee appealing for extra votes and inadvertently causing Cyd Ho to lose her seat. There are some harsh lessons to be learned over the next four years.

A lot of fuss has been made about the problems in a few polling stations, mainly caused by voters folding their ballots incorrectly (which must rank alongside the 'wrong kind of snow' as an excuse). I can understand people feeling upset if they had to wait to vote (or, in a few cases, left without having done so), but it only affected a handful of polling stations and only briefly. It's unfortunate, but there's no conspiracy involved!

I have to agree with Phil on this (I read this comment yesterday, but overlooked it today, and Ron has reminded me of it).

It is always unfortunate that any doubt could be thrown on to the results of the election, although I highly doubt there was any tampering going on. In fact I don't believe it for a minute. I would suggest it was just a logistical cock-up. The Democrats are talking about reserving the right to take legal action. I think they should can that. They will just end up looking like fools and cry babies.