Legal teams in Japan petition courts to nullify upper house election due to vote disparity

Legal teams in Japan will file lawsuits across the country on Monday seeking the nullification of the results of an upper house election, which saw the ruling Liberal Democratic Party-led (LDP) coalition win a landslide victory.

The two separate groups of lawyers will argue that an incorrect disparity in the weight of votes among constituencies meant that the election was held in a state of unconstitutionality.

The teams believe that the significant disparity in the weight of votes, with those from the least populated constituency involved in Sunday's election worth around 3 times as much as those in the most populated, is in contravention of the constitution which decrees that all votes should be equal.

A law was enacted last year to address the disparity and while the number of seats in the upper house was kept at 242, four two-seat constituencies were merged into tow two-seat constituencies, and the number of seats were also cut from four to two in 3 prefectures, while five other prefectures had their number of seats raised from two to five.

The law was intended to have narrowed the vote weigh disparity from as much as 4.77 times as it was in the upper house election in July 2013, that was deemed by the Supreme Court to have been held in a state of unconstitutionality, but the lawyers believe that the law has been inadequate in addressing the imbalance.

Calling for the ruling LDP-led bloc's overall landslide victory to be nullified, one set of lawyers filed their case at the Hiroshima High Court on Monday, aimed at the court overturning the result in the prefecture, and a similar case will be filed at the high court in Tokyo later in the day.

A separate group of lawyers will petition all of Japan's 14 high courts and their respective branches, seeking the overall upper house election results to be nullified.

Japan's Supreme Court has urged politicians on numerous occasions to correct the vote disparity after finding previous elections to have been held in a state of unconstitutionality, but has ruled not to nullify the results.

Sources close to the matter indicated Monday, however, that unprecedented action could be taken and the election voided if Japan's highest court upholds a ruling that the inequality in votes has not been adequately addressed by lawmakers and the electoral system not duly reformed as instructed in past cases to ensure equality as guaranteed by the constitution. Endit