China’s legal foundation shaken as 45 lawmakers expelled in unprecedented vote-rigging scandal

Chinese authorities on Tuesday revealed details of an unprecedented election fraud that ground the operations of a northeast provincial legislature to a halt and forced the dismissal of 45 national lawmakers.

The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress convened an extraordinary session to grapple with the fallout from a vote-buying fraud at the core of the Liaoning provincial legislature.

The provincial body was rendered inoperable after more than half of its standing committee members were disqualified over the fraud, making the committee incapable of forming a quorum.

State-run CCTV reported that there was no precedent since 1949 for a provincial legislature to be made inoperable, and top national lawmakers had to come up with a remedy that would conform with the constitution.

The election fraud in Liaoning was part of a bigger corruption scandal that saw its former Communist Party boss Wang Min, also an NPC Standing Committee member, detained as part of a graft investigation on the eve of the NPC’s annual meeting in March.