House of Assembly of the Bahamas | |
|---|---|
| 14th Bahamian Parliament | |
| History | |
| Founded | 4 March 1729 |
| Seats | 39 |
| Elections | |
| First-past-the-post | |
Last election | 16 September 2021 |
| Meeting place | |
 | |
| Bahamian Parliament, Nassau, The Bahamas | |
The Bahamas House of Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral legislature of The Bahamas, an island country in the Caribbean. It is housed at the Bahamian Parliament Building in Nassau, the national capital. The current Assembly was elected by the general election held on 16 September 2021. The Assembly has 39 single-member constituencies and it uses the first-past-the-post system for elections. The Members of Parliament (MPs) serve five-year terms. [1] [2]
Contents
The National Assembly's origins can be traced back to 1729 when a Representative Assembly was set up for what was then a British colony. It was formed with 24 members (16 for New Providence, and four each for Harbour Island and Eleuthera). [3] The first election after the country got independence from the United Kingdom was in 1977, when it had 38 constituencies. [4] Since then, it has had a varying number of constituencies in the assembly. For the 1987 and the 1992 elections, it had 49 constituencies. [5] [6]
The current constituencies are based on the recommendations of the Constituency Commission in 2021. [7] The commission conducts a review of the electoral boundaries every five years [7] and makes recommendations to ensure that there is parity of numbers in each constituency. [8] It suggests that each constituency have around 5,000 voters with a margin of 500. [9] During boundary review, the commission tries to keep constituencies roughly the same size while considering other factors like "the needs of sparsely populated areas as well as geographic conditions". The constituency of MICAL is the smallest considering the number of voters (1,392), while Golden Isles is the largest with 7,391 voters. [10]
In 2024 a new Constituencies Commission was appointed to begin another review of the electoral boundaries in preparation for the next general election. [7] [11] By late 2025 government and media reports indicated that the commission was considering changes to several large or sparsely populated constituencies, including MICAL, Killarney, Golden Isles and West Grand Bahama & Bimini, and had proposed creating two new constituencies by splitting Killarney and West Grand Bahama and Bimini. [12] [13]
