Inflating invalid vote numbers: Lack of respect for law among ward officials appalling

Editorial

16:06 JST, August 10, 2025

Trust in elections will be undermined if local government officials, who are in a position to oversee fair elections, have tried to arbitrarily adjust the number of votes.

A thorough investigation should be conducted to uncover the facts. It will also be necessary to severely punish the officials involved.

It has been discovered that during vote counting in Ota Ward, Tokyo, for the House of Councillors election, about 2,600 invalid votes were added to the results in both the electoral district and the proportional representation segment. This is suspected to be a violation of the Public Offices Election Law, namely voting manipulation.

According to the ward, a mistake was made in connection with the absentee voting system, which is used by people who are unable to make it to the polls due to travel, business trips and other reasons. The actual number of absentee voters was 3,229, but the staff mistakenly calculated the number to be over 5,800.

On July 20, the voting and vote counting day, staff received a report about the total number of absentee ballots, but they misunderstood this figure as referring only to absentee ballots received on July 20, and added to it the number of absentee ballots that had arrived by the previous day.

As a result, the staff mistakenly believed that more than 384,600 people had voted, even though the actual number of voters in Ota Ward was 382,000, and they subsequently miscalculated that there were about 2,600 votes missing during the vote counting process.

The ward’s election commission decided that the disparity in votes had to be made up, so they added 2,600 invalid votes to the actual number to make the numbers match.

It is utterly unacceptable to tamper with the number of votes cast in an election, which is the foundation of democracy. The lack of respect for the law among the staff is appalling.

The director general of the commission received a report from staff members immediately after the vote count was completed saying that the shortage had been made up by inflating the number of invalid ballots. However, the director general did not mention this until questioned by senior ward officials earlier this month.

It is inevitable that people will say the staff tried to cover up the situation.

At a press conference, Ota Ward Mayor Akimasa Suzuki apologized and emphasized that the inflated numbers were invalid votes and would not affect the candidates’ vote counts or the election results. Ward officials said that a third-party committee would be established to investigate the matter and the ward has already consulted with police.

During the official campaign period of the upper house election, false information spread on social media claiming that pencils were placed at polling stations so that votes could be altered later. There were also numerous unfounded posts claiming that the vote count would be manipulated.

The fact that incorrectly inflating vote numbers actually occurred could give momentum to claims similar to conspiracy theories. It is necessary to avoid a situation in which voters lose trust in elections and stop voting.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug. 10, 2025)