Elections for local councils in the Palestinian territories that began to be implemented in 2004 and 2005 have been riddled with challenges. The first of these challenges was the validity of the Higher Commission for Local Elections (HCLE), the entity created to organize the polls. The HCLE was an arm of the Ministry of Local government and was unaffiliated with the independent Central Elections Commission (CEC). Its establishment was seen as an attempt by the Fatah political group to manipulate local elections. A second and more complex obstacle to smooth elections has been the lack of administrative divisions in the West Bank and Gaza; an issue that saw an initial attempt at being resolved in 2006 and gained traction in 2008 with support of the International Foundation of Electoral Systems (IFES).

In the Palestinian territories, the municipalities, cities and villages do not have specific, delimited borders. Palestinians “know“ which village they belong to, but the boundaries of cities, towns and villages are not institutionalized by defined limits. This sometimes creates confusion for families and clans who have conflicting opinions as to which local council their village should belong to or whether their village is an independent entity that should have its own local council.

The HCLE added to this confusion by arbitrarily placing villages, towns and cities under newly instituted local councils right before elections were to take place. The HCLE and the Ministry of Local Government are tasked by local election law to define electoral districts. The HCLE used this authority to institute councils in four rounds throughout 20051. Before every round, the HCLE decided which areas would have elections and appoint ad-hoc local election committees in the area.

The lack of defined borders has made establishing the voter list difficult. As the electoral districts for local elections were not clearly defined during voter registration in September 2004, it was not possible for the HCLE to properly assign portions of the voter list to newly created ad-hoc election districts and its committees. As a result, the local committees would arbitrarily review the voter list received from the HCLE and issue a call to voters to visit the polling stations where the list was displayed and review their registration. In several cases, the local committees decided to delete a number of records from the voter list, justifying it with the claim that those voters did not belong to the district. This activity was once again seen as partisan and benefiting Fatah.

In some areas, the magnitude of problems that arose from this muddy delimitation issue led to a breakdown in the process which forced the elections to be pushed back to later rounds. In some areas, elections were never held.

Towards the end of 2005, the mandate to organize local elections was transferred to the independent CEC. From the start, the CEC made efforts to resolve the problem of border delimitation. However, the unstable political environment and intra-Palestinian conflict impeded all efforts.

In 2008, the work resumed with support of IFES. With the IFES initiative, the CEC, the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Local Government and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics formed the “Technical Committee for Definition of Local Election Districts”. This committee was tasked with identifying correct boundary delimitations by using data from several sources:

• British Mandate Maps from the 1940s-1950s
• Jordanian maps (30% of the West Bank only)
• GIS layers of National and Governorate Borders
• UNRWA defined Refugee Camp borders
• Some municipal and zoning boundaries defined in the past
• Aerial imagery from 2006, resolution of 1 meter
• PCBS maps - paper maps created by PCBS during the 2007 census

Throughout the duration of the project, the Committee met regularly, reviewed historical data, field surveys and interviews with residents for every locality, discussed contradictions between different data and redrew boundaries based on their conclusions. The Committee’s work was coordinated and supported by an IFES Geographical Information Systems (GIS) specialist. In all instances, they compared the border of every locality to that of other sources before delimiting the boundary. Partners in the Committee decided that in case of contradictory data, the decisive source would be the census data. Aerial photographs were used to match the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) hand drawn maps with the exact GPS locations of households. The final product is the map and GIS layers of 325 electoral districts for local elections. (The number of districts and list of localities under each district was defined in 2004).

In the next phase, the CEC will review its voter list database to comply with newly defined electoral districts. CEC will also be in cooperation with the PCBS in conducting tests to estimate the proportion of voters registered outside the districts.

One strong recommendation emerged from the Committee. While working on the definition of electoral districts, it was discovered that 325 districts is an excessive number and that many districts are too small for sustainable self-governance. Many of the districts only have about 1000 registered voters. Some of these districts should therefore be merged. This is an issue beyond the mandate of the Committee and the CEC. Nonetheless, the Committee’s work provides a useful basis for future political discussion on this issue.

by Vladimir Pran, Country Director, West Bank and Gaza