April 2022 Esthursian general election
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801 in the House of Ministers; 401 in the House of Barons | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 79.1% | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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28
167
The 2022 Esthursian general election was held on 3 April, 2022, as per the Constitution term limits. This will also be the first general election to use the Single Transferable Vote system in the Ministry elections, following the defeat of the Government bill to veto the Electoral Commission reforms to the 2022 election. This led to a more proportional result in the House of Ministers, resulting in the governing party having a lower share there for the first time since the 1950s.
Electoral system
In all recent Esthursian general elections, the houses tended to have relatively different compositions - with the Barony tending to, thanks to its party list elections, elect minorities and coalitions; and the Ministry, thanks to its first-past-the-post electoral system, usually electing majorities. This was the case in both 2011 and 2018, however not in 2014, which resulted in both houses remaining in a minority (later a coalition).
However, the Electoral Commission - empowered by outgoing Prime Minister John Largan at the end of 2014 - sent a Recommendation for Electoral Reform to the House of Barons in January 2022, outlining proposals to:
- redraw Barony boundaries, taking into account the 2019 Census data
- reform the Ministry system to Single Transferable Vote (STV), with approximately 5 members per constituency
- redraw Ministry boundaries to accommodate the above reform
Although the Government opposed the reforms and sought to delay their passage by referring them to the House of Ministers, a subsequent vote in the House of Barons called by Middle Party leader John Frampton attracted enough abstentions from the governing coalition to allow for a Government defeat and for its passage on 6 March. The Electoral Commission confirmed that these reforms would be incorporated to the 2022 general election the following day. It is likely that this will result in more concordant results between the two chambers, and that government majorities are now an outside chance in either House.
Voting eligibility
To vote in the general election, one had to be:
- on the Electoral Register;
- aged 15 or over on polling day;
- an Esthursian citizen;
- a resident at an address in the Union (or a Esthursian citizen living abroad who has been registered to vote in the UK in the last 25 years), and;
- not legally excluded from voting (for example, a convicted person detained in a mental hospital, or a person found guilty of certain "mistrustful"< corrupt or illegal practices) or disqualified from voting (members of the Royal Family and the Electoral Commission).
Individuals had to be registered to vote by midnight fourteen working days before polling day (20 March). Anyone who qualified as an anonymous elector had until midnight on 27 March to register. A person who has two homes (such as a university student with a term-time address but lives at home during holidays) may be registered to vote at both addresses, as long as they are not in the same electoral area, but can vote in only one constituency at the general election.
A study conducted by the Daily Herald, in conjunction with Republic, found that up to 1,200,000 have registered to vote as of 9 March, 2022; partly accredited to greater political interest by young people and the reduction of the voting age to 15.