The voter turnouts for the Engineering functional constituency clearly demonstrated the fact that people are recognizing the need for change. Never-mind the fact that R.H won by a "wafer-thin" margin, the story behind the election outcome clearly shows that in this year's election, the decision made by the voters themselves, to cast their votes reveal a deep angst about the lack of concern for the diminishing engineering profession as well as the general consensus about the general state of affairs.

Looking back, I am still shocked about the whole ordeal. We were soooooooo close to winning the seat. I'm going to make an endorsement/statement now: Hong Kong deserves a better professional representative, given that the difference between the two major candidates is having the incumbent emphasizing on his consistent record, and the new comer challenging and bringing in positive ideas for change. I think that the single pivotal factor in influencing voting behavior is that last week we were supposed to be making phone calls urging all voters to please come out and vote for a new legislator. I am positively sure that if I'd reached out to more voters by giving them a call we would probably have won this year's election.

There are several good reasons why I believe this is the case. First of all, Hong Kong people are by far one of the most politically indifferent or politically passive citizens compared to other major, global metropolitan cities. Thus, only when there is an imminent and very strong desire to bring in a new politician, and in times when their vote will be very crucial in determining the outcome of the election will they decide to go to the polling stations to cast their votes.

The other major reason stems from the decidedly complicated voting system in Hong Kong. The system is skewed in the sense that it's not possible to win all the seats within each functional constituency based on majority rule or popularity vote, because each seat can only be won based on an allocation of the number of votes required to capture each seat. Then, the party with the leading number of votes leads off the assignment and partitioning of each seat. Any insufficient "leftover votes" are thus "wasted," hence the reason why there are very few incentives to vote because the chances that the voter's choice of candidate actually does get elected.

On the other side of this system is the sheer number of candidates participating in the Legislative Council election. It is very possible to say that voters have too many choices and, coupled with the party's campaign strategy and game rules leading up to election day, it's possible to see strategies fail and collapse onto itself in cases where different camps with similar ideology divert votes away between candidates running on the same party ticket. Surely this complicated system of vote allocation could very well cost a particular party a crucial seat in the Legislative Council.

Hence, think-tanks and advocacy groups calling for universal suffrage by 2012 have been engaging in this arduous struggle, to overcome the obstacles found within the internal system of the legislative itself. These opinion groups have been highlighting the citizen's distress with the current imperfect election voting system. In Hong Kong, the political struggle for power has always been divided between to distinct camps (as a very very broad overview): the pan-democratic camp and the pro-Beijing loyalists. It should be noted, however, that politics on the one side is about exercising power and guarding private or public interests, but that some systems are 'better' in the sense that they're more democratic and therefore allow change to be realize. Politics, thankfully (depending on how one perceives it) is about continuous change. This is the one hope for a better society and for improving the status quo. When it is hard to walk forward in the right direction, we can always set ourselves the goal of reducing our errors.