On Sunday, a general election was held in Japan to select members of the House of Representatives, the lower house of Japan’s Diet (parliament). However, while voting is an important civic duty, those who had other plans for their Sunday afternoon could register to cast their ballots in advance at special polling places.
However, when one resident of the city of Ayase, Kanagawa Prefecture, showed up to vote early on Saturday, the registration system showed that he’d already been issued his ballot and submitted it. This wasn’t a case of someone trying to vote twice when they’re only allowed to vote once, though. Instead, the problem was that someone who had voted once never should have been able to vote at all.
After looking into the matter, the local election committee was able to determine that two days earlier, on Thursday, October 24, a different resident of Ayase had come into the advance polling place to vote. This person did not have the numbered early voting registration ticket that is ordinarily required, but because the tickets had been mailed late, the person was still allowed in, where they filled out the necessary on-site paperwork, which includes declarations of the voter’s name and date of birth. Since the person’s date of birth matched that of someone registered to vote early, they were given a ballot, which they filled out and dropped in the ballot box.
A review of the paperwork, though, has shown that the name of the person who voted on October 24 does not match the name of the person with that birthdate who had registered to vote early. Instead, the registered name is that of the person who showed up to vote on October 26. In other words, there are two residents of Ayase who have the same birthday. One of them registered to vote early, but the other was actually the first to show up at the polling place, obtain a ballot, and cast a vote.
There are several other layers to the weirdness, one of which is that the person who voted on October 24 is a foreign national. While foreign residents of Japan are eligible for various social welfare benefits, voting remains the exclusive privilege of Japanese citizens, which the Ayase foreign resident is not. This means that the foreigner either decided to roll the dice on walking into the advance polling place and got incredibly lucky in that someone who had registered to vote early just happened to have the same birthday, or the foreigner somehow knew ahead of time that they shared a birthday with someone who’d already registered.
The rightful voter was still able to cast his ballot on the 27th, but, as a final oddity, both ballots, the one from the rightful registrant and the foreigner, will be treated as valid votes, presumably because with Japan having a secret ballot system, there’s no way to track down which ballot was the foreigner’s and void its vote. However, since the foreigner did have to provide his/her name in order to receive the ballot, and apparently didn’t use an alias (considering that the election committee was able to determine the non-citizen status of the person who was mistakenly given the ballot), they’re likely to face some sort of legal repercussions for their actions.
Source: Kanaloco, Sankei Shimbun
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