In accordance with the provisions of Constitutional Organic Law 19,175 on Regional Government and Administration, the director(s) of the Electoral Service, Elizabeth Cabrera, determined the total number of regional councilors to be elected in each region, and in the corresponding provincial constituencies, for the elections next October, adjusted according to the number of inhabitants established in the last official national census, in this case, from 2017.
In this way, at the national level, 302 regional councilors will be elected, divided into sixteen regions and 66 provincial constituencies.
The territories that have the most quotas according to their population are the Metropolitan Region (34, divided into eleven provincial districts), Biobío (28, divided into five) and Valparaíso (28, divided into nine).
The regions of O’Higgins, Maule, La Araucanía and Los Lagos elect 20 representatives; Antofagasta, Coquimbo and Ñuble choose 16; and Arica, Tarapacá, Atacama, Los Ríos and Magallanes choose 14.
In the case of Ñuble, the allocation of eight places for the province of Diguillín is maintained; four for Punilla and four for Itata.
2,262 councilors throughout the country
In the case of councilors, according to Constitutional Organic Law 18,695 of Municipalities and Constitutional Organic Law 18,556 on the Electoral Registration System, the Servel determined their number to be elected by each commune based on their voters.
Throughout the country, of the 346 communes, only 25 elect ten councilors, among them Chillán, whose voter projection is 160,001 people.
Meanwhile, the municipalities that elect eight councilors are 43, and those that have six representatives are the majority: 278.
Among the latter are twenty of the twenty-one communes in the Ñuble region, which do not have 70 thousand voters, the minimum required to elect eight councilors.
Of all the communes of Ñuble, only San Carlos, the capital of the province of Punilla, could approach that figure in the medium term, since it currently has 48,933 registered.
Its current mayor, Gastón Suazo, maintained that “the role of the councilors is important for the supervision of municipal management, therefore, we believe that the more people who are supervising is much better for our municipal work.”
According to the communal chief, “responsible oversight is key to the proper functioning of public institutions. Regarding our administration, it is important to highlight the positive report on the evaluation and classification of financial risk of the municipality (service contracted by the municipality), which allowed us to ratify our responsible actions from a monetary point of view. The result of this report has already been presented to the Municipal Council, by the external company in charge of said evaluation,” he mentioned.
The case of Chillán
The regional capital of Ñuble elected ten councilors for the first time in the last municipal elections of 2021, since until that year, its council was made up of only eight members.
This was due to the fact that its electoral roll increased that year to 152,720 voters, and the communes that exceed 150 thousand voters elect ten councilors.
However, in 2016, when Chillán still belonged to the Biobío Region, Los Angeles, it was ahead of itself, since it exceeded 150 thousand voters and elected 10 councilors at that time.
According to experts, electing more councilors increases the chances of “diversifying” the council, because as the number of councilors to be elected in a commune grows – in the case of Chillán, each list can present ten candidates. -, the number of votes that a list requires to obtain the first councilor decreases.
This has given rise to the Chillán council to incorporate new forces, different from the once two large blocks (Ex Nueva Mayoría and Chile Vamos), which dominated the positions in recent decades. This is how in 2021 the environmentalist Marina Crisóstomo and the communist Quenne Aitken came to the council, both on their own lists, without participating in broader pacts.
One of the main criticisms made of the electoral system for electing councilors (proportional with the D’Hont formula), is that if a candidate from the most voted list obtains many votes, he “drags” his fellow candidates on the list, with which would distort the will of the citizens, who give more preferences to candidates who are not ultimately elected.
That is why, with more seats, the council has greater representation.
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