By YUSUKE MORISHITA/ Staff Writer
October 14, 2022 at 17:10 JST
Lawyers for the plaintiffs head toward Osaka High Court on Oct. 14. (Takefumi Horinouchi)
OSAKA--The Osaka High Court ruled on Oct. 14 that the July Upper House election was held in a “state of unconstitutionality” because of large disparities in the weight of votes cast across Japan.
Shortly after the July 10 vote, two groups of lawyers filed 16 lawsuits across 14 high courts and branches around Japan, claiming the unequal value of votes violated the Constitution.
The legal actions also called on the courts to nullify the election results. But the Osaka High Court has rejected that request.
The latest ruling is the first among the 16 lawsuits, with the other rulings expected to be handed down by Nov. 15.
The Supreme Court will issue a unified ruling sometime next year as the high court cases are expected to be appealed.
In the past, the Supreme Court ruled the 2010 and 2013 Upper House elections were held in a state of unconstitutionality, one step away from being unconstitutional.
In other words, votes cast in smaller prefectures were worth more than votes in more populous ones because of how the electoral seats were distributed, violating the principle of equal representation in the electoral system.
In the 2010 election, there was a fivefold difference in the value of a vote cast between the most and least populated prefectures, while the difference was 4.77 times in the 2013 election.
The Diet passed laws to create districts that combined two prefectures and reapportioned seats in other prefectures. That reduced the vote disparity to 3.08 times in the 2016 Upper House election and to 3 times in the election held three years later.
Lawsuits were filed over those two elections as well, but the Supreme Court found both to be constitutional.
But the vote disparity increased to 3.03 times in this year’s election. The value of a vote in Kanagawa Prefecture, which had the most voters per seat on election day, was only worth 0.33 of a vote cast in Fukui Prefecture, which had the least number of voters per seat.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the Diet no longer shows an interest in correcting vote disparity. The election administration commission, which was the defendant in the case, argued that the vote disparity was close to where it was in the 2019 election.
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