Lebanese voters are choosing their lawmakers on Sunday in the first elections since 2009.
Polling stations opened at 7:00 a.m. (Beirut time) across Lebanon’s 15 districts which were divided according to a proportional law for the first time in the country’s history.
597 candidates are running on 77 closed lists, with 3.7 million eligible voters are to elect 128 members of parliament on Sunday.
The new electoral law maintains the sectarian seat allocation in the parliament, but swaps out the decades-old plurality system for a proportional list-based one.
In each district, the seats are distributed among the various religious sects present in that area.
The smallest district in the south is represented by five parliament seats, and the largest, the hilly region of Chouf-Aley, has been allocated 13 seats.
All voters, regardless of sect, can vote for all seats in their district. In the past, they could individually choose which candidate they want to elect for each seat, mixing and matching from various parties as they wished.
Under the new law, voters must choose from among wholesale lists presented on pre-printed ballots.
The mandate of the parliament was extended for three times and the last parliamentary elections took place in 2009.
Source: Agencies
