THE ASAHI SHIMBUN2009/12/29
OSAKA -- Setting a new standard in vote disparity, the Osaka High Court ruled Monday that a situation in which a single vote in one district is worth more than two in another district is unconstitutional.
The court, referring to the Aug. 30 Lower House election, said the current drawing of district borders has created a situation that violates the constitutional equality of votes.
But the court brushed aside claims by the plaintiff, a man in his 60s from Minoo, Osaka Prefecture, that the election, which resulted in a landslide victory for the Democratic Party of Japan and led to a change in government, was invalid for Osaka Prefecture's ninth district.
It is the first time since the current single-seat district system was introduced for the chamber in 1996 for a court to rule as unconstitutional the difference in weight of a single vote between a populous constituency and a less-populated district.
It is also the first such ruling of unconstitutionality at the high court level since May 1991, when the Osaka High Court handed down the ruling concerning the 1990 Lower House election, according to internal affairs ministry records.
According to the ruling, the maximum vote disparity in the last Lower House election was 2.30 times. That disparity was set between the Chiba No. 4 district, which had the largest voter population on election day at 487,837, and the Kochi No. 3 district, which had the smallest population at 211,750.
According to the lawsuit, one vote in the Kochi No. 3 district was worth 2.05 times the vote weight in the Osaka No. 9 district, which had 433,290 voters, including the plaintiff.
The Osaka prefectural election committee, which was the defendant in the case, cited a Supreme Court ruling that said a vote disparity of less than three times for Lower House elections and less than six times for Upper House elections could be considered constitutional.
But the high court set a stricter standard by saying a vote disparity of two times or more should be considered unconstitutional.
"The Constitution seeks the utmost equality in exerting the right to vote, and seeks equality for the value of each vote," according to the ruling by Presiding Judge Kitaru Narita.
The ruling also said the Diet's legislative failure to act, which resulted in maintaining the current voter disparity, "cannot escape being branded as unconstitutional."
The Supreme Court has ruled as unconstitutional or potentially unconstitutional vote disparities on five occasions: for the 1972, 1980, 1983 and 1990 Lower House elections and the 1992 Upper House election.
However, no court has ever invalidated an election out of concerns for causing confusion.
The Osaka High Court weighed the legitimacy of the current system, in which of the 300 seats contested under the single-seat portion, one seat is allotted to each prefecture, and the remaining 253 seats are distributed in proportion to the population size of each prefecture.
The arrangement is said to have been set up out of consideration for depopulated areas.
While the court acknowledged that the arrangement previously worked as a transitional solution, it now "goes against the spirit of the Constitution that recognizes (Diet members) as the representatives of the national populace."
(IHT/Asahi: December 29,2009)
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