Home > 3 Electoral systems > GEORGIA - Joint Opinion on the Election Code
 
 
 
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Paragraph 16
 

Article 15, par. 6 and Article 29, par.1 (e) require the CEC to form electoral districts and define the boundaries. However, the law does not provide which criteria are to be used to form the electoral districts and it does not require single-mandate constituencies to be of equal or comparable size, thus failing to guarantee one of the main principles of electoral rights, namely the equality of the vote.[6] To guarantee equality in voting power, where elections are not being held in one single constituency, constituency boundaries are to be drawn in such a way that seats representing the people in Parliament are distributed equally among the constituencies, in accordance with a specific apportionment criterion. The same rule applies to regional and local elections. For instance, in the last Parliamentary elections, the number of voters in individual election districts, which as a rule coincided with the administrative districts, ranged considerably from approximately 6,000 to 140,000. Such large differences in numbers deny the equality of the vote in practice.