By-election
In some cases a vacancy may be filled by a method other than a by-election (such as the outgoing member's party nominating a replacement) or the office may be left vacant.
[1] During the eighteen-year Cavalier Parliament of Charles II, which lasted from 1661 to 1679, by-elections were the primary means by which new members entered the House of Commons.
In those systems, alternatives to holding a by-election include: For the Australian Senate (in which each state forms a multi-member constituency elected via single transferable vote), the state parliament appoints a replacement in the event of a vacancy; in 1977 a referendum amended the Constitution to require that the person appointed must belong to the same political party (if any) as the Senator originally elected to that seat.
Mixed-member proportional representation, additional member, and parallel voting systems, in which some members are chosen by party lists and some from single-member constituencies, usually hold by-elections to fill a vacancy in a constituency seat; for example, the assassination of Shinzo Abe resulted in a by-election in Yamaguchi's 4th district, which Abe represented in the House of Representatives of Japan (elected under parallel voting).
[8] If a vacancy arises in a party list seat, it would be filled in the manner usual for party-list proportional systems; for example, on the resignation of Darren Hughes from the Parliament of New Zealand in March 2011, Louisa Wall filled the seat after all the five candidates above her on the New Zealand Labour Party's list declined it.
[9] Exceptions to this rule exist: In the German Bundestag, which uses mixed-member proportional representation, by-elections were originally held upon the vacancy of any constituency seat.
Confusingly, this change occurred alongside a switch from mixed single vote, where a single set of votes was used for both constituency and list seats, to a conventional two-vote mixed member proportional system - a change which granted constituency members an electoral mandate distinct from the party's list seats.
By-elections are now only held if a vacancy arises in a constituency seat and there is no associated party list with which to fill it – typically, if the former member was elected as an independent.
However, in December 1995 the Court of Disputed Returns threw out the result in Mundingburra after it was found that 22 overseas military personnel had been denied the chance to vote.
Consequently, a by-election for Mundingburra was held in February 1996, in which the electorate was won by the opposition Liberal Party, pushing the Goss government into minority.
After the no confidence vote, Rob Borbidge the leader of the Nationals the senior partner in the coalition became premier until his government's defeat in the 1998 state election.
Gilles Duceppe's 1990 upset landslide by-election victory in Laurier—Sainte-Marie with 66% of the vote on behalf of the newly formed Bloc Québécois was the first electoral test for what was initially a loose parliamentary formation created two months earlier after several Quebec MPs defected from the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties to protest the failure of the Meech Lake Accord and provided the first indication that the party could be a serious force in the province of Quebec.
As Australia used a first-past-the-post system at the time, the conservative vote was split between the Country and Nationalists, allowing Labor candidate Edwin Corboy to come in first place and win the seat.
The Swan by-election is cited as the reason for the introduction of preferential voting, to prevent Labor from benefiting from a divided opposition in the future.
In 1942, the Conservatives' Arthur Meighen (who had already served as Prime Minister during the 1920s) sought to re-enter the House of Commons of Canada through a by-election in York South.
On November 1, 1944, General Andrew McNaughton was appointed to Cabinet as Minister of Defence without having a seat in parliament, after his predecessor resigned during the Conscription Crisis of 1944.
The major campaign issue became the government's policy of "limited conscription" during World War II, which McNaughton supported, and which the Conservatives rejected.
Under Article 49(1) of the Constitution of Singapore,[15] a by-election should be called for any vacancy arising from a constituency—particularly Single Member Constituency[16]—within a reasonable time period.
Although Murphy had received a lower first preference total than Cathal King, he outperformed the Sinn Féin candidate in attracting transfers.
His appointment as a senior minister while not a member of either house of Parliament was against convention, and he therefore sought to regularise the position by standing in the first available by-election, which was at Leyton in January 1965.
In 2010, Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election to the United States Senate.
Coakley, a Democrat, had been widely expected to win, but Brown unexpectedly closed the gap and won, a shocking result in the heavily-Democratic state of Massachusetts.
