The Principle of Proportionality in self-government electoral law

Taking advantage of the freedom to determine the electoral system for self-government bodies, it was largely decided to base it on the principle of proportionality. The proportionality of elections applies in the elections to municipal councils of communes with over 20,000 inhabitants, poviat councils and regional assemblies. As a result, this results in the dominant position of the principle of proportionality in shaping electoral systems in local government elections. The article analyzes the scope and form of the principle of proportionality of elections used in practice in elections to local self-government bodies, and also assessed the adequacy of political representation from the point of view of reflecting the distribution of votes cast by voters in the election and the deviation of this distribution from proportional representation.

The role of the administrative court in the process of dividing a commune into constituencies

The manner of determining the division of a commune into electoral constituencies and determining the number of seats per district is an expression of the implementation of the principle of equality of elections in a material sense. The proper division of a commune into constituencies is a guarantee of the equality of electoral law. The Electoral Code of 2011, originally stipulated that no legal remedy was available to the decisions of the National Electoral Commission issued as part of the verification of the provisions of the electoral commissioner. The Constitutional Tribunal, by a verdict of 6 April 2016, ruled that this regulation is unconstitution. The Act of January 11, 2018 introduced a two-instance control of the legality of the division of the commune into constituencies (before the provincial administrative court and before the Supreme Administrative Court). Subsequently, it was considered that, given that electoral activities related to the formation of constituencies and the change of their borders are covered by the electoral calendar and must be carried out without undue delay that the judicial review procedure should assume speed and efficiency of proceedings in this matter. The Act of June 15, 2018 amending the Act – Election Code and certain other acts amended the provisions on the jurisdiction and mode of judicial review of the electoral bodies’ acts on matters related to the creation of constituencies and on the deadline for lodging appeals and complaints to the court. Court proceedings in this matter have become one-instance, and complaints about resolutions of the National Electoral Commission regarding the division communes into electoral constituencies are to be recognized only by the Supreme Administrative Court. 

The role of electoral commissioner in the process of dividing municipalities into electoral districts for municipality council elections according to Electoral Code

The Electoral Code of 2011 made a significant change in the existing rules for the conduct of elections of councilors to municipal councils introducing the principle that these elections in most municipalities in Poland will be held in single-member districts. This has caused the need for a new division of the municipalities into electoral districts, according the rules described in Electoral Code and in the guidelines of National Electoral Commission. The electoral commissioners are important in this process, because their task is to oversee the obey the electoral law by the local authorities. Their powers include i.e. the right to resolve complaints about municipal council resolution concerning the division of the municipality into electoral districts and the right to replace the municipal resolution by their own resolution if the local authority failed to perform its obligations on time or in a manner consistent with the law. The granting of these competencies to the electoral commissioners raises serious doubts as to whether the provisions of Electoral Code are not inconsistent with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, and does not violate the supervisory powers of voivodes. The goal of this paper is to show the role of electoral commissioner in the process of dividing municipalities into electoral districts for municipality council elections according to Electoral Code, especially according to the line of the Constitutional Court expressed in the justification of the sentence in the case P 5/14.

The Polish electoral system to the European Parliament has been criticized for as long as it has been in operation; that is, uninterruptedly since 2004. The commonest objections and criticisms concern the lack of the fixed assignment of seats to territorial districts; significant and unjustified differences in population size among districts; risk of not winning a single seat by the smallest districts; unequal territorial representation; overcomplicated and unclear mechanism of translating votes into seats and in consequence creation of an illusion of a territorial representation. However, there are at least four alternative electoral systems which are able to eliminate all the drawbacks of the current model while warranting the proportional seat distribution both among electoral districts in accordance with the principle of material equality of each vote and among election committees pursuant to the requirements set for the electoral systems of the member countries by the European Union law. The aim of the paper is to compare these alternatives with the current model, pinpoint the drawbacks and advantages of each solution and indicate which criteria are optimized by the respective electoral systems.

The Constitutional Principle of Proportionality in the Choice of the Size of the Constituency and the Method of Distributing Seats. Simulation of Changes in Parameters in the Elections to the Polish Sejm

The aim of this article is to, on the basis of the case study of Polish elections to the Sejm, answer the question of which factor has a greater impact on the increase in the proportionality of the electoral system - the minimization of the number of constituencies or the change in the method. In order to do it, the Authors specified the results of six elections to the Sejm in the years 2005-2019 and the value of the proportionality index in two simulation versions. In the first one, the number of constituencies was limited from 41 to 16. In the second, the method of determining the result was changed from D’Hondt into modified Sainte Lague. The results were relatively surprising.

Material Equality in Senate Elections

The article analyzes the issue of material equality in elections to the Senate. The electoral system in elections to the upper house of parliament in Poland radically violates the principle of material equality of elections. It is characterized by a large disproportion in the size of electoral districts in terms of the number of inhabitants in individual electoral districts. The current division into electoral districts, resulting from the annex to the Electoral Code, violates its provisions. It is also controversial from other points of view. It also raises the question of its compliance with the principle of a democratic state of law.

Why can’t it be done differently? Limited voter representation in provincial assemblies (sejmiki) in the period of 2014–2024

The problem of distorting the representativeness of elections to provincial assemblies in Poland is widely noted. The local government elections in 2024 confirm the indicated state of affairs. In many situations, the natural electoral threshold significantly exceeds the statutory threshold, and large groups of citizens do not have their representation in the sejmiks, while the largest groupings are overrepresented. The authors of this article set out to compare the number of voters without representation in provincial assemblies after the introduction of the Electoral Code, i.e. in the 2014, 2018 and 2024 local elections, despite having voted for groupings that exceeded the statutory electoral threshold. The authors, using institutional-legal analysis and classical systemic analysis, also propose a simple way to solve the pointed out significant problem for the representativeness of the elections, which is the abandonment of the division of provinces into smaller electoral districts.