Summary
The electoral system should endeavor to ensure equal suffrage by according each voter and vote equal weight.
Obligations
Election Parts
Issues
Criteria
- Each vote was of equal weight
- Where variances occurred between the number of voters in various constituencies, they were small
- Safeguards were put in place to ensure that there existed no opportunity to falsify or substitute ballots, including during the vote counting and tabulation process
- Voter registration processes prevented multiple registrations
- Safeguards were in place to prevent multiple voting and other forms of ballot fraud
Quotes
- The rights guaranteed under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 are crucial to establishing and maintaining the foundations of an effective and meaningful democracy governed by the rule of law. Nonetheless, those rights are not absolute. There is room for “implied limitations”, and Contracting States must be given a margin of appreciation in this sphere. In this field, Contracting States enjoy a wide margin of appreciation, provided that they ensure equality of treatment for all citizens. It does not follow, however, that all votes must necessarily have equal weight as regards the outcome of the election or that all candidates must have equal chances of victory. Thus no electoral system can eliminate “wasted votes” (see Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt, cited above, § 54).
- The principle of one person, one vote must apply, and within the framework of each State's electoral system, the vote of one elector should be equal to the vote of another.
- Tak[e] proactive measures to eliminate all barriers in law and in practice that prevent or hinder citizens, in particular women, persons belonging to marginalized groups or minorities, persons with disabilities and persons in vulnerable situations, from participating fully in effectively in political and public affairs, including, inter alia, reviewing and repealing measures that unreasonably restrict the right to participate in public affairs, and considering adopting, on the basis of reliable data on participation, temporary special measure, including legislative acts, aimed at increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in all aspects of political and public life;
- [E]ach voter has in principle one vote; where the electoral system provides voters with more than one vote, each voter has the same number of votes.
- The electoral system should ensure that there is equal suffrage through the principle of ‘one person, one vote’. This principle means that every voter has the same number of votes in an election, and that each vote is equal in weight.
- Equal suffrage requires that the weight of each person's vote be essentially the same. This has particular significance when developing the legal framework for delimiting election districts.
- Electoral constituencies should be drawn in a manner that preserves equality among voters. Thus, the law should require that constituencies be drawn in such a way that each constituency has approximately the same population size.
- In some electoral systems, the elector nonetheless has more than one vote. In, for example, a system that allows split voting (voting for candidates chosen from more than one list), the elector may have one vote per seat to be filled; another possibility is when one vote is cast in a small constituency and another in a larger constituency, as is often the case in systems combining single-member constituencies and proportional representation at the national or regional level.In this case, equal voting rights mean that all electors should have the same number of votes.
- Equality in voting rights requires each voter to be normally entitled to one vote, and to one vote only. Multiple voting, which is still a common irregularity in the new democracies, is obviously prohibited – both if it means a voter votes more than once in the same place and if it enables a voter to vote simultaneously in several different places, such as his or her place of current residence and place of former residence.