2 courts rule July election vote gap in state of unconstitutionality

Two high courts ruled Monday the disparity in the weight of votes in July's House of Councillors election was "in a state of unconstitutionality," but dismissed the plaintiffs' demand that the electoral results in a total of seven constituencies be nullified.

The decisions by the Takamatsu High Court and the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court were the fourth and fifth rulings among 14 similar lawsuits filed with high courts across Japan by groups of lawyers.

The lawyers claim vote-value gaps of up to 4.77-fold in the July 21 upper house election are against the equal-protection clause under the Constitution, and thus the election should be invalidated.

Presiding Judge Hiroshi Yamashita of the Takamatsu High Court recognized that there was "excessive inequality" in the weight of votes at the time of the July election, which posed a question of unconstitutionality.

However, Yamashita said the vote-value gap did not clearly violate the Constitution as failure by parliamentarians to change the allocation of upper house seats stipulated in the election law did not go beyond the Diet's discretionary power.

The disparity in the number of eligible voters per upper house member stood at 4.77-fold between the Hokkaido constituency, which has the most voters, and the Tottori constituency, which has the fewest. It translates into a ratio of 1-to-0.21 in the vote value between the two constituencies.

In the seven constituencies covered by the two suits -- Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui, Tokushima, Kagawa, Ehime and Kochi prefectures -- the gaps in the weight of votes were between 1.30- to 2.45-fold compared with the Tottori district.

Election boards of the prefectures defended the disparity in the weight of votes, saying it has narrowed from the 2010 upper house election and that the parliament did not have enough time to implement reforms.

In October last year, the Supreme Court ruled the maximum fivefold disparity in the weight of votes in the 2010 upper house election was "in a state of unconstitutionality" and called on the legislature to carry out drastic reforms.

However, the vote-value gap only slightly fell to 4.77-fold in the July contest as a result of minor amendments to the election law in November last year. The revised election law states that deliberations to fundamentally reform the electoral system should be concluded before the next upper house election in 2016.

In late November, the Hiroshima High Court's Okayama branch ruled that the results of the upper house election in the Okayama Prefecture constituency should be invalidated due to an unconstitutional gap in the weight of votes.

Earlier in December, the high courts in Hiroshima and Sapporo ruled the disparity was "in a state of unconstitutionality" but stopped short of declaring the election outcome should be invalidated.

Rulings on the nine remaining lawsuits are scheduled to be handed down by the year-end.

Kyodo News International