The number of registered voters in Hong Kong has dropped for the fourth straight year ahead of the city’s “patriots-only” legislative elections in December.
The 2025 registers of electors, released on Thursday, showed a total of 4,138,992 people registered as voters in the city’s geographical constituencies – the only category of lawmakers open for the public to vote.
The 4.13 million voters will be eligible to cast a ballot in December’s legislative elections, when they will select only 20 out of 90 lawmakers in the Legislative Council (LegCo). The rest will be chosen in small-circle elections.
Thursday’s figure represented a drop for the fourth consecutive year and a decrease of about 330,000 compared with the peak level in 2021, when Hong Kong had a total of 4.47 million registered voters.
Meanwhile, the number of registered voters for functional constituencies – which have 28 blocks representing Hong Kong’s major industries and sectors and will return 30 seats in December’s race – also slightly dropped from 198,157 in 2024 to 193,674 this year.
The legislative elections, scheduled for December 7, will be the second after Beijing overhauled Hong Kong’s electoral systems in 2021 to ensure only “patriots” could stand for office.
The electoral overhaul followed Hong Kong’s large-scale pro-democracy protests and unrest in 2019 and Beijing’s imposition of a national security law.
The number of directly elected seats in LegCo’s geographical constituencies was slashed from 35 to 20, while the total number of seats rose from 70 to 90.
A vetting mechanism – which saw candidates subject to checks by the police National Security Department, the city’s national security committee and a separate Election Committee – was also introduced to screen candidates.
The Election Committee – an already powerful panel tasked with selecting the city’s leader – was expanded and further empowered to select 40 of the legislature’s 90 seats.
Vacancies at the 1,500-strong Election Committee were filled earlier this month in a poll with a 97.3 per cent turnout.
The new election system has in effect excluded pro-democracy candidates from entering the race, while many of Hong Kong’s former opposition lawmakers have quit politics or been jailed.
During the last legislative elections in 2021, voter turnout was 30.2 per cent. At the time, it was the lowest in the history of Legislative Council elections since the former British colony was returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Out of the 90 lawmakers elected, only one is a self-proclaimed non-pro-establishment figure, while the rest were Beijing loyalists or associated with the pro-establishment camp.
