A lawyer heads to the Sendai High Court's Akita branch in Akita on Nov. 1, 2021, to file a lawsuit over vote weight disparities create by Japan's rural-urban population imbalance. (Kyodo)

       TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Lawyers filed a series of lawsuits across the country Monday seeking to void the results and conduct a do-over of Sunday's lower house election due to vote weight disparities created by Japan's rural-urban population imbalance.

       The disparity in the weight of a single vote between the most and least populated single-seat constituencies stood at 2.09-fold, widening from the 1.98-fold seen in the previous House of Representatives election in 2017 when electoral districts were rezoned.

       The Supreme Court has found levels above 2.0 constitutionally problematic, but it has never handed a ruling to nullify an election result.

       The vote gap in all of the 289 single-seat electoral districts will be challenged by two groups of lawyers. The Sapporo High Court and the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court are among a number of locations where the lawsuits were filed.

       "Prime Minister (Fumio) Kishida said he will listen to people's voices. The principle of one person, one vote is the basic premise of listening to the people," lawyer Kazuaki Hasumi told a press conference after filing a lawsuit with the Hiroshima High Court.

       According to government data released ahead of the election, the disparity in the value of a vote based on the number of eligible voters as of Oct. 18 was 2.09-fold between Tottori Prefecture's No. 1 constituency in southwestern Japan with 231,313 voters and Tokyo's No. 13 district with 482,445 voters.

       The Supreme Court ruled in December 2018 that the vote disparity in the 2017 race was constitutional.

       To address the problem, the Diet enacted law in May 2016 to redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies to better reflect the ratio of the population based on preliminary figures of the 2020 national census. The new zoning will be introduced in 2022 or later and until then, six prefectures will slash one seat each.

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