I’ve mostly missed coverage about the Japanese elections, which take place tomorrow, August 30. I don’t have much information to add to my previous posts on Japan, except to note that recent polls maintain that the Democratic Party is on track to win government in the first clean change of government in 54 years. Here’s a thread for you all to discuss the election.
Update: reports indicate that the Democratic Party will win over 300 seats in the 480-seat chamber, giving them a clear majority and clearing their path to form a new government.
Is there a site with live results?
OK, let me translate the Japlish from Google Translate:
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=y&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww3.nhk.or.jp%2F&sl=ja&tl=en&history_state0=
Polls close 9pm EST (NSW). DPJ have said they will enter a coalition with SDP & New Party if they win as they don’t have an upper house majority.
There is also an English language site for NHK: http://www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/
Interesting thing that popped up on Poll Bludger – apparently the DPJ might end up with underhang seats (they’ve got a MMP system like NZ). Seems like too many of their list candidates were also running in safe-ish LDP seats and won them, leaving not enough other folk on the list to fill all the PR seats they were entitled to from their very impressive vote. I wonder if they’d be kicking themselves.
It’s not actually an MMP system, it’s a parallel voting system. Under MMP, the number of constituency seats you win effects your number of list seats. Under parallel voting, the two are determined independently. So if the DPJ wins an extra district, they don’t lose a list seat.
Adam Carr has an overview up of seats etc. Seems like they’ve won about 310 of 480. Not a bad showing.
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/j/japan/japan2009.txt