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boycott of the elections impossible, this system resulted in a predictably overwhelming government victory.
Both the new political atmosphere after Gomulka's return to power in 1956 and the revised electoral law of October of that year made the January 1957 elections more of a genuine political contest. The new electoral law changed little except to add a provision designed expressly to facilitate some choice among candidates; it stated that the number of candidates "should" exceed the number of seats to be filled "by not more than two-thirds." Although the distribution of seats between the political parties was still decided upon, prior to the election, non-PZPR deputies were assigned nearly 48% of the seats instead of the 36% they had held previously. In all, 723 candidates were permitted to contest the 459 Sejm seats. The 264 "excess" candidates - all approved but not specifically endorsed by the regime - competed for about one-third of the total seats. The dramatic electoral campaign stressed that anything short of an overwhelming popular vote of confidence in the Gomulka regime would bring about the restoration of "Stalinist" rule, probably through Soviet intervention. Apparently agreeing with the regime's assessment of the available alternatives, and in the light of the Catholic Church's urgings not to abstain from the polls, Polish voters cast 98.4% of their votes in favor of candidates specifically endorsed by the Gomulka regime.
Despite this victory for the regime, many voters took advantage of the opportunity to scratch out leading names on the ballot. In one small community in southern Poland voters in fact succeeded in totally depriving a Communist candidate of his seat, the only such instance of wholesale voter revolt in Communist Poland. This and similar dangerous examples of "democratization" impelled the Polish leaders to enact changes in the electoral law in December 1960, 4 months before the scheduled elections of 1961. Under the amended law, the PZPR's representation within the National Unity Front was increased, thus insuring increased representation in parliament; the number of electoral districts was reduced from 116 to 80 in order to provide a greater concentration of leading candidates per district; secret voting was discouraged by urging "demonstrative and open casting of ballots in support of People's Poland"; and, most importantly, the number of "excess" candidates was reduced. Moreover, the amended law stated that the number of candidates "may" exceed the number of seats to be filled "by no more than one-half." Thus the new law permitted but no longer required that extra candidates be included on the ballot. These electoral provisions help explain why the results of the 1961, 1965, 1969, and 1972 elections have been virtual carbon copies of one another.
The significance of the March 1972 elections, the first held under the Gierek regime and a year in advance of constitutional requirements, lay not in the failure of the new regime to institute more democratic procedure in the Western sense, but in there being a necessary, legal prelude to Gierek's planned restaffing of the governmental apparatus to parallel the reshuffling of the party leadership which was formalized at the Party Congress in November 1971. The 1972 elections, therefore, removed most of the holdovers of the Gomulka regime from their remaining governmental positions by the simple expedient of excluding them from the 1972 ballot; at the same time their seats were appropriated by men of Gierek's own choosing.
In some respects, the 1972 elections were more tightly controlled by the central Communist party apparatus than earlier ones; for example, secrecy surrounded much of the background of most but the key candidates, and the prior selection process was more rigid than ever before - probably in order to assure that conservative Communist leaders at the lower levels of the bureaucracy would not negate Gierek's desire to put forward candidates more in tune with his reform programs. On a country-wide basis, 625 candidates were approved to run for the 460-seat parliament; the number of "excess" or "expendable" candidates - 165 or slightly over one-third of the total - was the same as in the elections of 1969.
The results of the 1972 balloting, which most Polish voters combined with a Sunday outing in pleasant spring weather, were predictable. Of the country's 22,313,851 eligible voters, 97.94% went to the polls, casting a total of 21,849,397 valid votes, 99.53% of which were for the officially approved list of candidates. Although a number of political leaders in the new regime made a relatively "poor" showing (albeit still in the 90 percentile range) as a result of voters crossing their names off the ballots, the normal limits of such practice established in previous elections were not exceeded and there was no hint of concern from any official quarter. In any event, Gierek himself received a personal endorsement from his constituency in Silesia that was, at 99.8% of the votes cast, the highest vote for any party leader ever, as well as the highest for any candidate in the 1972 elections. By contrast, the "lowest" winner in the 1972 elections received 91.1% of the votes in his district.
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