The Central Elections Commission (CEC), concluded today a workshop on Election Law reform, legal experts and representatives of different civil society organizations (CSOs) and political parties discussed the issue of reforming the Law on Elections to Local councils, to make it more responsive to the principles, standards and best practices in managing an conducting the electoral process.
During the workshop, conducted over two days, participants agreed upon the dimensions of the required electoral reform, which included revisiting the electoral system and the size of electoral districts, devising mechanisms for handling winning by acclamation, and looking into the age of candidacy and the nomination of relatives. Furthermore, the participants suggested reconsidering the women quota and the order of women on the lists and among the winners, in addition to emphasizing the importance of identifying a financial maximum limit and mechanisms for observing and controlling the candidates’ sources of funding and expenditure mechanisms, while developing mechanisms for deterrence and executing penalties against the individuals in violation.
Specialized groups, comprised of all stakeholders, will be working on diving deeper into studying the proposed reforms, consolidating and phrasing recommendations according to a specific path, mechanisms and timeframe. These recommendations will be submitted afterwards to the competent authorities for amending the election law in response to the demands of all stakeholders.
It is worth mentioning that the electoral reform workshop is conducted under the project of supporting the CEC, funded by the EU, which comes in response to the recommendations of the report of the entities who observed the recent local elections in Palestine, which called for legal reforms in service of the electoral process.