The
new National Advisory Committee of the Democratic Party discussed on Friday the
election law drafted and presented by Defense Minister L.Bold. Earlier, D.Erdenebat,
the party Secretary General, suggested the assignment of NAC members to the
eight policy councils of the party. These are on justice and rights, the environment,
the economy, agriculture, education, social policy, health and industry. This
will allow every member to contribute to the party policy and the suggestions of
these councils would be submitted to the party group in Parliament.  NAC members appreciated this method of
allowing them participation in the deliberations of the councils.

The
draft by Bold proposes a proportional election system with larger
constituencies where the electors will vote for both the party and party’s
candidates. The number of mandates will be proportional to the number of voters
in a constituency. The votes for the parties will be counted first, then it
will be divided by the number of mandates and only then will it become clear if
the party has won a seat.

A
party will choose a maximum of 76 candidates according to the laws of political
parties and election. The draft wants at least 15 percent of MPs to be women. A
minimum number of Kazakh MPs has also been suggested. Voting a constituency at
a center will be final if at least 70 percent of the ballots cast are
considered valid.

Members
of the NAC wanted to know the details of the procedure of preparing the voters’
list as this is always a point of disagreement among parties. They also had
questions on the proposed changes in the law on the election commission, on the
vote counting procedure to be followed, and on the steps to prevent a person from
voting more than once.

These
concerns will be incorporated in the draft.