Japan Press Weekly

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2013 April 17 - 23 [POLITICS]

Access to info on Net during election campaigns will spur voters’ political participation

Internet campaigning will start with this summer’s Upper House election. Akahata on April 19 ran an interview with Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Sasaki Kensho who has taken part in discussions regarding online election campaigning at the House of Representatives Committee on Political Ethics and a special committee on election system and has engaged in consultations on the matter with representatives of other political parties.

Q: What is your view of the planned lifting of the ban on making use of the Internet in election campaigns?

Sasaki: The Japanese Communist Party has been calling for free use of the Internet so individual voters can obtain more information in election campaigns.

Someone may think that they can vote on the Internet, but that’s not the case. Net campaigning will allow voters to call on others to vote for a specific party or candidate through their websites, blogs, video posting sites, or SNS sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Lifting the ban on making use of the Internet will give more opportunities for voters to have access to information on the policies of each political party and candidate. Accordingly, they will get more involved in politics which in turn will contribute to the improvement of democracy in Japan.

The Public Offices Election Act has been said to be a list of don’ts. It only says, “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” The law prohibits many ways of distributing information during election campaigns. Once the campaign period starts, every political party and candidate can no longer update their websites and their blogs under the existing law.

The revised law will enable users to update information on their websites even during election campaigns. Parties and candidates will be able to respond to questions posted by Internet users. The use of the Internet will also provide political parties and candidates with venues to hold open debates.

Individual voters will be able to post pictures or videos of candidates they take in street-corner oratory. To ask voters through websites for “voting for the JCP in proportional representation elections” or “casting a ballot for so-and-so in a small district constituency” will be possible for individuals from now on. That is to say, the Net election campaign ruling will promote interactive election campaigns between political parties, candidates, and voters.

The amendment to the Public Offices Election Act has remained only partial this time, but I’m sure that it has marked a milestone opening a crack in the list of don’ts.

Q: Tell me about a significant affirmation that you obtained from the bill sponsors in Diet deliberations regarding the revision of the law.

Sasaki: What the JCP has emphasized in the discussion was that “each potential voter should have a chance to play a role in online campaigns.” Other political parties called for allowing online campaigning not only to political parties and candidates but also to corporations and organizations which are not entitled to exercise individual voting rights. To admit such bodies to online campaigning would infringe on people’s basic rights as individual eligible voters.

Article 15 of the Japanese Constitution states that the right to vote is the “people’s inalienable right.” In reply to my question regarding the definition of “people”, the bill sponsor affirmed that “people” in this context is defined as “natural persons” and doesn’t mean any legal persons in the sense of corporate bodies.

Q: What was the JCP’s stance toward bills submitted by ruling and other opposition parties?

Sasaki: The Diet discussed two bills: one submitted by the ruling bloc and the Japan Restoration Party and another by the Democratic and Your parties.

The ruling bloc’s bill permits the use of the Internet to everyone in addition to political parties and candidates running for office while limiting the use of emails to political bodies and candidates.

Regarding the ruling bloc-submitted bill, the JCP proposed that the bill be amended to allow online election campaigning only to political parties, candidates, and individual voters; enable individual voters to send emails; and consider further deregulation of election campaigning. Although the JCP proposal was rejected, we voted for the ruling bloc’s bill because we saw the advantageous aspect of the bill in the lifting of the ban on the use of the Internet.

The DPJ-Your bill would enable every person, including corporate bodies, to use emails as a tool to campaign for political parties and candidates. Unlike websites, to which everyone can easily pay attention, emails are highly confidential and have a function of unilateral communication. Under the DPJ-submitted bill, corporations would be able to send biased emails to their customers, irrespective of their support of political parties. Based on this judgment, we voted against the DPJ bill.

Q: Tell me about other related issues.

Sasaki: Even after use of online campaigns is liberalized, many tight regulations still remain in the current law regarding the election system. For example, even though people can post on their websites the election policies of political parties and candidates, the law bans Internet users from distributing or displaying printed versions of the page. In a Diet hearing, some unsworn witnesses pointed out that a “ban on door-to-door canvassing falls outside the global standard.”

All political parties agreed to continue discussing the need for deregulation of the election campaign system. Taking advantage of the liberalization of online campaigning, we will make further efforts to the free flow of information in election campaigning.