IO Files: US/A/1899
Memorandum by the Principal Executive Officer of the United States Delegation (Popper) to Area Advisers of the Advisory Staff
Certain questions have arisen regarding the manner in which the elections for UN Council seats, scheduled for next week, will be held. It is suggested that area advisers familiarize themselves with rules 84, 85 and 86 of the Assembly’s rules of procedure which cover this point.
Under Article 18 of the Charter, a two-thirds majority is required for the election of Members to UN Councils. Elections are held by secret ballot; there are no nominations. It is the practice, for each Council election, to have Members write on the ballot the names of as many countries as there are seats to be filled for that particular Council—for example, on the first ballot for the Security Council, each Member will be asked by the President to write the names of three states on the ballot since there are three seats to be filled. If one candidate should then receive the necessary two-thirds majority, that candidate would be declared elected and a second ballot would be taken, in which each Member would vote for two choices, the voting being restricted to the four candidates which, apart from the state already elected, had received the greatest number of votes in the first ballot. If this process fails to produce a two-thirds majority for any other candidate in three successive ballots, the procedure set forth in rule 86 will be used to break the deadlock.
Some reference has been made to the possibility of “abstaining” in voting for a particular candidate, such as Yugoslavia. It is important to note that there is no way of abstaining in such an election, short of failing to vote, casting a blank ballot, or casting an invalid ballot. The majority necessary for election is two-thirds of the Members present and voting—that is, 40 votes if all 59 Members cast valid ballots. If a Member seeks to “abstain” on Yugoslavia by not voting for any Slav candidate, but instead for two or three non-Slav candidates, the result would be to cut down the number of votes for Yugoslavia although the number of votes required for election would remain the same. Thus, an “abstention” in this sense is equivalent to a negative vote, and if a sufficient number of states followed this practice the [Page 265] resulting tendency would be to strengthen non-Slav candidates at the expense of the Slav candidates. It is probably desirable, therefore, to ask states which say they will abstain in the Security Council vote on Yugoslavia, to explain exactly how they mean to do so, and to point out to such states that in fact an abstention of the type described above will amount to a negative vote, insofar as the election of Yugoslavia is concerned.