Arguments on electoral system resurrected

The President is expected shortly to announce the eight members of the Electoral Commission but it is not clear whether the chief electoral commissioner will be retained, sources said yesterday.

Opposition leader Alfred Sant, at a meeting with the prime minister on Tuesday, suggested four persons whom the opposition would like to see nominated to the commission, and declared that he no longer had confidence in the chief electoral commissioner, Carmel Degabriele.

Dr Sant gave as his reasons the way the electoral boundaries had been drawn up as well as the fact that no remedy had been found, after the removal of the need for embarkation cards for people travelling abroad, to check whether people were entitled to vote.

Contacted yesterday, Mr Degabriele said he had no comments to make for the time being.

The commission is made up of eight commissioners, all of whom are nominated by the President on the advice of the prime minister, who would have consulted the leader of opposition.

The practice over the past few years had been for four commissioners to be suggested by the leader of the opposition and four by the leader of the PN.

The chief electoral commissioner, on the other hand, is a head of department and is appointed like any other head of department by the prime minister. The electoral law states that the chief electoral commissioner becomes chairman of the electoral commission. He is also responsible for the day to day running of the electoral office.

Mr Degabriele was permanent secretary at the Social Policy Ministry and was made chief electoral commissioner by the Labour government before the 1998 election.

In his statement, Dr Sant said on Tuesday that the electoral boundaries drawn up by the commission were unjust and this was clear from the election results which gave the PN a far bigger parliamentary majority in proportion to the No 1 votes the party polled.

PN information director Gordon Pisani said yesterday these were the same arguments Dr Sant had used when he complained he had only a one seat majority in his 1996 government.

"The MLP then had exactly 50.72 per cent of the votes and 50.7 per cent of the seats in parliament. In 1998, Dr Sant called an election with the same electoral boundaries as they were in the 1996 election. Had these been so bad, he would have changed them.

"The issue is not really how large the parliamentary majority is, but how one governs. The governments of 1971 and 1987 had a one seat majority and survived a full five years.

"Furthermore, changes to the electoral system have been proposed repeatedly, but they could not be implemented because of Labour's opposition," Mr Pisani said.

He recalled that the 1994 "Gonzi Commission" (so called because it was chaired by then Speaker Lawrence Gonzi) had proposed various changes but they were rejected by the MLP. So too was the report by Prof. Anton Buhagiar aimed at achieving more precise proportional representation.

Alternattiva Demokratika general secretary Stephen Cachia said an end to gerrymandering of electoral districts could only be obtained through an effective reform of the electoral system, not through further tinkering with the electoral districts.

Reacting to the Labour Party's appeal for a change to the electoral districts to reflect in a just manner the distribution of votes in the country, Mr Cachia said the Labour Party was right in saying that in the last three elections the number of seats in parliament did not reflect in a just manner the number of votes obtained by political parties.

"Experience has shown that the party in government regularly tinkers with electoral districts to further its own electoral interests.

"The only way for this gerrymandering to stop once and for all is for the electoral system to be reformed in a manner which does away with electoral districts and is based on a national quota and threshold," Mr Cachia said.

He called on the political parties to recommence talks on electoral reform so that a just and fair system could be agreed on by all parties.