Should ineligible voters vote?

I had already written this letter on January 18 - when Arnold Cassola's article "Humiliating voters... and the modern feudal lords" was pubiished in your paper. But I decided to wait and see whether an MLP official would reply to that article and rebut Dr Cassola's insinuations. Someone like the new deputy leader for party affairs, Dr Michael Falzon, who is Labour's expert on the electoral law.

To my surprise, not a word in reply has been sent either to The Times in reply to another letter on the same subject written by Steve Cachia, AD's general secretary, nor to The Sunday Times. This failure on the MLP's part might leave the erroneous impression that the party is not convinced of its stand on this issue, when on the question of eligibility of voters, Labour is in the right and the PN (now!) and AD are in the wrong.

If Labour believes that by not reacting, the PN and AD will stop making a song and dance of this issue, then Labour has not yet learnt anything about the PN's and AD's strategy! Confirmation of this was the advert published on page 8 of The Sunday Times (February 1) - "The Malta Labour Party wants to exclude 1,648 persons from voting".

To the PN (who had been resorting to the courts to strike off ineligible voters for decades up to last year) and the AD, our electoral law should be ignored in that part where it stipulates the conditions under which a person would be entitled to vote. If the PN and AD have their way, once a person born in Malta turns 18, and is thus automatically included in the electoral register, that person would be entitled to vote in our own general election for as long as he or she lives. And wherever that person may have migrated to!

Were this to happen, we would have a situation where thousands of Maltese who had left Malta to seek a new life elsewhere - and thus had lost their right to vote as they were struck off the electoral register according to similar provisions in the electoral law as we have now - would never be able to come and vote in our general elections. While those already registered as voters, and all those who will be registered in future (such as those who turn 18) would continue to enjoy the right to vote for the rest of their lives, even though they may have left Malta to seek pastures new anywhere else in the world!

The truth is that, indeed, our electoral law needs some amendments, such as in the case of those who go abroad to study or work for the Maltese government, but whose home for all intents and purposes is still Malta. I am not including those who just return to Malta for holidays because they keep a holiday flat here.

I understand that both the MLP and PN had reached agreement on that. But the PN government scuppered that agreement by not moving the necessary amendments to the electoral law in Parliament. Instead, it took measures to abolish serious control on the eligibility of voters by scrapping embarkation cards for Maltese citizens while keeping them for tourists, without putting in place a more modern checking system on who leaves and returns to Malta. Thus the electoral commission and the political parties were denied the only reliable way of control which could ensure that only those eligible to vote would appear in the electoral register.

A line on who should be allowed to vote has to be drawn. If the present one is no longer appropriate then let us decide where the line should be drawn. But clearly drawn it must be! That can only be done by consensus. Pressure should be brought to bear on the political parties to reopen urgent discussions to find a just solution.

But for anyone to suggest that the present electoral law, or part of it, should be ignored until a better alternative is agreed upon, is tantamount to bringing such a serious matter as the conditions under which we choose whom to elect to office, to ridicule, by having ineligible voters deciding with us who will be voted into power. If ineligible voters go unchallenged in front of our courts, then they can keep on voting forever. But if challenged, all they have to do is 'lose' their passport and get one a few months before the election!