✶ 投票 · Voting · 公職選挙法
Japanese voters do not tick a box. On a lower-house polling day they write a candidate's name by hand on one ballot, a party's name on a second, and mark × against any Supreme Court justice they want dismissed on a third. Here is who can vote, how the day works, and what happens to a ballot once it is in the box.
Before polling day
Every Japanese national aged 18 or over can vote for both houses of the Diet. The age was lowered from 20 in 2016. Foreign residents cannot vote. People serving a sentence of imprisonment, and people whose rights were suspended for election or political-funds offences, lose the vote for that time.
The municipality enters you on its electoral register automatically, from the resident register (住民基本台帳): once you are 18 and have been recorded as living there for three months in a row, counted from the day you filed your moving-in notice. Registration runs on the 1st of March, June, September and December, and again before each election. An entry is permanent until struck off, and one register serves every election.
If you moved less than three months ago, you are not yet on the new register. Someone who had been registered for three months at the old address and moved out within the last four months is registered there instead, and votes in the old municipality.
Many municipalities send each voter a card or notice before polling day with the polling station. Bring it, but you can vote without it: staff check you against the register, which is quicker with an ID such as a My Number card or a driving licence.
Polling day
Polling stations open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. A municipal election board may, for special reasons, open a station up to two hours earlier or later, or close it up to four hours early; it can never stay open later.
You go to your own polling station, are checked against the register, and are handed each ballot in turn. You write on it in the booth and put it in its box yourself. You may not write your own name on a ballot.
A voter who cannot write can ask the presiding officer for a proxy: two assistants are assigned, one writes as you instruct and the other checks. Braille ballots and styluses are kept at every polling station.
The ballots · 投票用紙
Write the name of one candidate standing in your district (art. 46(1)). One of 289 seats, first past the post.
Write the name or registered abbreviation of one party (art. 46(2)). 176 seats in 11 blocks, by D'Hondt.
Printed with each justice facing their first general election since appointment, or their first since ten years passed after their last review. Mark × for any you want dismissed; leave the others blank (Review Act, art. 15; Constitution, art. 79).
Write one candidate's name. Districts are prefectures, except Tottori–Shimane and Tokushima–Kōchi, which are merged.
Write either a party's name or one of its candidates' names (art. 46(3)). Both count towards the party's seats, and the candidates with the most name votes take them: an open list (art. 95-3). Since 2019 a party may also name priority candidates (特定枠), who are ranked above all the others whatever their personal votes.
Try it · 2026 candidates
Counting officers (開票管理者) decide each ballot, and the law tells them to count it whenever the voter's intent is clear (art. 67). Type a name and see how it would likely be read. This is a teaching model, not the officers' rulebook.
① District · 小選挙区 · write one candidate's name
② List · 比例代表 · · write one party's name
③ Supreme Court review · 国民審査 · × to dismiss, nothing to keep
Click a box: empty → × → ○.
按分 · apportionment
If two candidates share a surname or a given name and a ballot gives only that part, the ballot is still valid. Article 68-2 tells the counting district to split it between them in proportion to the other valid votes each received there. The same applies to two parties with the same name or abbreviation.
So MIC's totals are not whole numbers. The LDP's district vote in 2026 was 27,710,493.452. In 2024 the list votes of the Democratic Party for the People (6,171,533.489) and the Constitutional Democratic Party (11,565,122.62) carried fractions too. MIC prints candidates' votes rounded to whole numbers, and its best-loser ratios suggest it works from the exact counts. In Ishikawa 3, こんどう和也 got 64,893 printed votes to the winner's 73,035: that is 88.8519%, which truncates to 88.851, but MIC prints 88.852%.
From votes to seats · 2026
1. Seats per party. In each block, every party's list votes are divided by 1, 2, 3… and the largest quotients take the seats (D'Hondt, art. 95-2(1)). A party cannot win more seats than it has eligible candidates; when its list runs out, the seat passes to the next quotient. In 2026 that happened to the LDP in four blocks and to Team Mirai in one block.
2. Who takes them. Seats go down the party's list in order. Dual candidates who won their district are treated as not on the list (art. 95-2(5)); those under one tenth of their district's vote are struck (95-2(6)). Candidates sharing a rank are ordered by best-loser ratio (95-2(3)), which MIC truncates to three decimals.
Each party's votes are divided by 1, 2, 3… The largest quotients win, one seat each, until the block's seats run out. Struck-through quotients belong to a party with no eligible candidates left; their seats pass to the next quotient.
Lists here are rebuilt from MIC's elected members (with their list ranks) plus the district results of each party's dual candidates in the block. In every block and party, applying the rules to the rebuilt list returns MIC's members in MIC's order.
Other ways to vote
From the day after the election is called until the day before polling day, at an early-voting station in your own municipality, usually 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. You sign a declaration that you expect to be busy on the day (work, travel, illness, a funeral and the like). The ballot goes straight into the box, exactly as on polling day, and stays valid even if you move or die before the count.
Away from home during the campaign? Ask your own municipality for the ballot papers and vote at the election board of the place you are staying. Patients and residents of designated hospitals and care homes vote where they are. Voters with severe disabilities (certain grades on a disability certificate, or care level 5) can vote by post from home; crews of ships abroad can vote by fax, and so can Japan's Antarctic expedition. A 17-year-old who turns 18 by polling day votes this way at their own municipality.
Citizens living abroad join the overseas register: at their municipality when filing their move-out notice, or later at the embassy or consulate once they have lived in its area for three months. They can then vote in national elections and the review, in person at a mission, by post, or in Japan if they are back at election time.
2026 review: 54,153,752 valid ballots on 8 Feb 2026. Junichi Takasu (高須順一): 7,664,301 to dismiss; Mami Okino (沖野眞已): 7,436,291 to dismiss.