Japan’s Lower House Election Ruled Constitutional in All Lawsuits

Tokyo, June 17 (Jiji Press)–The Kanazawa branch of Nagoya High Court ruled Wednesday that February’s election for Japan’s House of Representatives, the lower chamber of parliament, was constitutional in terms of vote-value disparities. With the ruling, 14 high courts and branches throughout the country have now all judged the Lower House election to be constitutional in 16 lawsuits filed by two groups of lawyers. The groups claimed the vote-value disparities of up to 2.1 times in the election had violated the constitutional principle of electoral equality. Kazuaki Ono, presiding judge at the Kanazawa branch, said that the so-called Adams method, introduced in the 2024 Lower House election to better reflect differences in regional populations when setting the number of constituencies in each prefecture, was reasonable. The vote-value gap has widened not due to factors other than natural population migration, Ono said, concluding, “The extent of the gap is not significant.” Previous rulings on 15 lawsuits had reached similar conclusions. All high courts and branches had previously found the 2024 Lower House election, with a gap of 2.06 times, to be constitutional. A Supreme Court petty bench had reached the same conclusion. Hidetoshi Masunaga, who is among the plaintiffs, told a press conference in Tokyo that the latest set of rulings was “clearly wrong as an interpretation of the Constitution.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]