VERONICA SHIU PUI-SIE, a 24-year-old university student, was crowned Miss Hong Kong after winning more than 156,000 votes at TVB’s Miss Hong Kong Pageant on Sunday night, far outnumbering the first runner-up, Erin Wong Cheuk-ki, 23, who received about 28,000 votes.
The second runner-up was law degree graduate Katherine Ho Yim-kuen, 22.
More than 200,000 viewers cast their ballots via the contest’s smartphone app to determine first, second and third places.
It was the third year that the TVB pageant had used the public voting system but some viewers complained that this year the adjudicating committee had been given too much power; previously the public and judges had a 50-50 weighting of votes.
The first “universal suffrage” vote — as the broadcaster billed it in 2012 — turned into a fiasco when thousands of viewers were left unable to vote due to a computer-server breakdown. Eventually, the winner had to be chosen by the judges.
The company initially suspected that the crash had been caused by hackers who generated millions of votes to overload the system. But an investigation found no evidence of this, according to the broadcaster. There were no such hitches this year or the previous year.
“TVB is telling you to doi zyu sin (pocket what you get),” said a web user on one of the city’s discussion forums, referring to the fact that the public was only allowed to choose between candidates picked by the judges appointed by the broadcaster.
The expression has been popularized recently by pro-establishment figures who try to convince Hongkongers to accept an imperfect reform package.(SD-Agencies)
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