2022 Bahraini general election
General elections were held in Bahrain on 12 November 2022 to elect the 40 members of the Council of Representatives, with a second round in some constituencies on 19 November. The elections were condemned domestically and internationally as a sham. Rights groups condemned the atmosphere of "political repression". The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, based in London, called it a "sham", and Amnesty International stated that the elections were "held in an environment of political repression following a decade in which the authorities have infringed upon human rights, curtailed civil society, banned political opposition parties and shuttered independent media". They issued a report on the elections, "Bahrain: Elections, But No Civic Space" in which they stated that Bahrain's political system did not, in practice, allow citizens to peacefully and legally seek constitutional change. Domestically, there were advance calls for a boycott of the elections as in the 2018. On election day hackers took down government websites, including the elections, parliamentary and state-news websites. A group calling itself "al-Touafan" ("the Flood") claimed responsibility for at least some of the attacks, saying they were "due to the persecution carried out by the Bahraini authorities, and in implementation of the popular will to boycott the sham elections". Electoral system The 40 members of the Council of Representatives are elected from single-member constituencies using the two-round system; if no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the first round, a second round is held. Under the 2002 constitution, the Council is the lower house of parliament, which examines and passes legislation proposed by the king and the king's appointed cabinet; the upper chamber, the Consultative Council, is appointed by the king and can block legislation passed by the lower house. Only Bahraini citizens are entitled to contest and vote in the elections. Many political dissidents active in previous elections were stripped of their Bahraini citizenship. Citizens could also be disqualified from voting if they had been members of opposition parties and groups that the government had banned, if they had previously resigned from parliament, or if they had been sentenced to more than six months in prison. Many had been sentenced to terms more than six months for non-violent participation in the 2011 protests (the government estimates that over 300 protestors had been sentence to more than one year). Voters who had not voted in previous elections were not included on the voter lists, but were eligible to register. These rules disenfranchised 21.5% of Bahraini citizens, a higher proportion than in the 2018 elections; in 2022 344,713 voters were eligible, down from 365,467 in 2018. However, the electorate was less than a quarter of the population of 1.5 million, as most residents do not have citizenship. Candidates A total of 330 candidates contested the elections, of which 73 were women, an increase from 293 candidates in 2018. Former members of Wa'd, al-Wefaq, and Amal, formerly-legal opposition parties, were banned from standing for election, and from taking leadership positions in civil society organisations.