Should we care who won the referendum?

So, who won the EU referendum? Some people are arguing that it does not matter, since the call to go to the polling booths again in a general election makes the question redundant. I beg to differ. The issue of whether one should accept the result of the referendum raises matters of principle which bear on our system of governing ourselves and posits the question whether we are all playing to the same rules.

The practical necessities of running a State also prescribe how consent is to be given. It is obviously not possible to get the consent of every person to every act that a government undertakes. If unanimous consent is unavailable, what number is correct? If it is not possible to get 100 per cent, then how about 95 per cent? 80 per cent? 75 per cent?

All of these numbers would be unfair. If it requires 80 per cent of the people to agree to, say, the election of a government, then any 20 per cent of the people have the power to override the wishes of the other 80 per cent. But what makes the 20 per cent so special?

If we are all equal, then the wishes of half of us plus one should override the wishes of any number fewer than that. When more than half is sufficient to decide, we have "majority rule". This is the basis and the method of democracy.

It seems rational to argue that majority rule is better than minority rule or one man rule, providing that man is equal. As Aristotle put it, the wisdom of many is likely to be better than that of the minority or one. Fifty per cent plus one seems therefore to be the most reasonable and obvious solution, since it seems impossible to get the sense of all the people. But we have to keep in mind that, according to this theory, while only 50 per cent plus one of the people may have voted for something, they are still able to force the other 49 per cent to comply.

As Andrew J. Galambos wrote: "The political concept of Democracy arose as a consequence of counting yeas and nays on particular issues and then selecting the men who would decide how issues were to be resolved. Whichever man could muster the choice of more persons than his opposition could muster became the dominant person for the society."

In today's free world all political decisions are made using majority rule democracy. The group who is deciding may be small (a committee faced with solving some particular problem), or large (the entire voting electorate of a nation choosing a government). Regardless of the size of the group deciding, a decision is made when one faction within the group achieves a simple majority. That faction wins, the minority faction loses.

Majority rule consensus requires only a simple majority to force the minority, the losing voters, to accept the position of the majority, the winning voters. There is no need to gain the agreement of all of the members. There is no need to prevent the minority from losing.

In the words of John Stuart Mill, "the people who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the self-government spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous (my italics) or the most active (my italics) part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority."

Thus democracy can be defined as "a process whereby the will of the majority can be ascertained, influenced, or even created". Some people will make up their own minds. Others will be influenced by the opinion-makers. But whatever their choices, it is unlikely that the motivation either of the voters or of their "influencers" will be anything other than their self-interest or that of a close circle. Most of the people interviewed by Lou Bondì for his TV programme said so while others implied it. Few mentioned the common good.

True, some interest-groups are fighting for principles. But most political decisions are based on the simple criterion "what's good for me". But whether people are influenced by political or economic expertise, or by the personalities of media icons, whether they vote every few years or vote electronically on each debate... the motivation has not changed.

We are still, in the main, voting for "what's good for me". Never mind if others suffer as a result of unjust laws, or whether others (including the next generation) must pay for what we demand now but cannot afford. The Will of the Majority is Law.

In the course of the current controversy as to whether the Yes vote secured a majority, nobody has dared suggest that the majority should not have their way. The sticking point is whether it should be a majority of the electorate, irrespective of whether it has voted or not and whether it has cast a valid vote or not, or whether it should be a relative majority of those who cast a valid vote. What are the written rules of the game laid down by our laws and Constitution for electoral battles?

They are that (1) in a general election, the party winning more than 50 per cent of the valid votes will have enough candidates elected to have a parliamentary majority, even if it wins less than 50 per cent of the seats at stake; (2) in a general election, the party which obtains more votes than the vote of the other parties combined shall have enough seats to have one seat more than the other parties combined; and (3) in a referendum, a proposal which commands more than 50 per cent of the valid votes shall be deemed to have been approved by the electorate.

It is clear that our electoral system does not recognise abstentions and invalid votes. Therefore, any calculations as to who has won a general election or a referendum must exclude abstentions and invalid votes. No amount of contortions can change the effect of these rules of the game. One might fume against them for all one will, but until they are changed, either the players concerned accept them or they must abandon the field of play.

These are the rules under which the Malta Labour Party has accepted to play the game at the forthcoming elections. It is strange that it is prepared to live by the result in five weeks' time, but continues to reject a result obtained under the same rules on March 8.

James Russell Lowell, writing in The Atlantic Monthly (October, 1860), said: "In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers ... We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents' messages, and congress, for the last dozen years ...

"The true danger to popular forms of government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing."

Even if we do not go back to 1860, any reasonable man will accept to be bound by the wishes of a majority, however much he disagrees with that majority, if the consent obtained by that majority is in written and valid form. But to argue that he should be similarly bound if that majority stays at home or invalidates its consent, is a recipe for chaos.

Had there been a provision in our Constitution and electoral law for registration of abstentions and invalid votes, in recognition of the fact that voters might wish to influence the outcome of an election by the very act of abstaining or invalidating their vote, then the rules would have been different.

I am not aware that the MLP has proposed any constitutional changes of this nature. Indeed, even when Dr Sant made his proposals regarding a general election and a consultative referendum, in his letter of January 24 to the Prime Minister, he talked in terms of a proposal which obtains 60 per cent of the "valid" votes cast in a referendum.

Even, however, in the hypothetical case of a system which recognises abstentions and invalid votes, the law-makers would still have had to choose between specifying a relative majority rule or a 50 per cent-plus-one rule. I would suspect that, particularly in such a hypothetical system, the 50 per cent-plus-one rule would be a non-starter since it would virtually guarantee gridlock. Even if a relative majority rule might mean that the result might favour an overall minority of total votes, at least it would award the spoils to the most numerous in favour of a particular proposal.

I also have had a go at trying to calculate what the result would have been in the hypothetical case that an adjustment be made for abstentions and invalid votes. I refuse to indulge in "backtracking" calculations to a pre-desired result. For this purpose, I therefore used average percentages prevailing in general elections between 1971-1998, though I also looked at the 1987 percentages (being the most favourable to the MLP hypothesis).

The results change if one uses percentages prevailing between 1962-1998, but the conclusions do not. 1962 is a good starting point, because the percentage of abstentions and invalid votes stabilised at a new level after averaging 23.5 per cent in previous elections since 1947. The results are presented in the table.

My calculations clearly show that the Yes vote obtained a relative majority in all cases and exceeded the 50 per cent threshold even if the result is adjusted for "normalised" abstention/invalid percentages. The advantage may be as low as 1,500 votes under the worst circumstances, but in a scenario where the Yes camp is penalised by between 14,900 and 17,800 votes for abstentions and invalid votes, nobody in a sane frame of mind would then argue that this is not enough of a majority.

The MLP has consistently refused to accept the referendum as a means of settling the EU issue on the grounds that (1) it was consultative and non-binding, (2) it was organised unilaterally by the government, (3) it did not give the voters the option of voting for 'partnership', (3) the campaign was characterised by a "democratic deficit" arising from the imbalance in resources between the Yes and No camps, and (4) the result was in any case superfluous because EU membership in May 2004 could only take place after a general election.

The MLP could have stuck to these grounds, on most of which it may arguably have had solid and politically-defensible justifications for ignoring the outcome of the referendum.

But to argue that the No camp won the referendum is laughable.