September 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 | 75.8% | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The September 2022 Esthursian general election will be held on September 23, 2022, as a result of the Early Election Act 2022 passed on September 8. The first snap election called since January 2011 and the first called by an incumbent government since the November 1982 general election, this was the first election in which two major blocs had formed around all three main parties.
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
This system, at first opposed by the incumbent Government, was used in the April 2022 Esthursian general election and will be used in this election likewise.
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 seven working days before polling day (16 September). Anyone who qualified as an anonymous elector had until midnight on the same night to register, as snap elections allow for. 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.