Lower house panel agrees on revision to election law

Japan Policy & Politics, July 26, 1999

TOKYO, July 21 Kyodo

All political parties on a House of Representatives panel agreed Wednesday to revise the Public Offices Election Law to enable sailors and fishermen at sea to cast ballots for national elections, panel members said. The bill revising the election law is expected to be enacted during the current Diet session, scheduled to end Aug. 13, as a consensus was reached among the lower house special committee tasked with revising the law. After the committee's formal approval, the full lower house is sure to adopt the bill, after which it will likely be sent to the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of Japan's bicameral parliament. The bill, which stipulates the use of specially equipped fax machines that protect the secrecy of the ballots, will affect some 32,000 people who will be working aboard fishing and merchant vessels, according to the Home Affairs Ministry. Political sources said last week the bill will likely clear the lower house as early as next Tuesday. If it is enacted during the current Diet session, people working at sea will be able to vote in national elections in May next year at the earliest. The bill stipulates that mariners in the far seas can cast ballots only for lower house elections and polls for the House of Councillors. By-elections and local elections are not covered. Under the bill, which treats a mariner's vote as a kind of absentee ballot, voters will register their ship's fax number with one of some 60 municipal offices of the election administration committee designated by the Home Affairs Ministry. They will receive blank ballot sheets via the fax, and then fill in the pertinent information before faxing their ballots back to the respective offices. The fax machines at the committee's offices will be equipped with special devices to conceal with the use of stickers the names of candidates and political parties written in the faxed ballots. Committee officials will send those ballots to local election administration committees where the voters are registered for the election. The stickers will later be removed as the ballot counting gets under way.