Fiddling with facts and figures

Readers confronted by the CNI's "Solemn declaration" on page 12 of The Times (March 30) may have noticed a number of serious flaws in this document.

The declaration consists largely of a repetition of the tissue of distortions, exaggerations and misinformation which was propagated by the CNI, and others opposed to EU membership, in the run up to the referendum. More seriously, the declaration also includes a false statement which mirrors Alfred Sant's attempt, in March 2003, to trample underfoot our democracy by publicly declaring to his supporters that the opposition had won the referendum shortly after the referendum results became apparent. This is an insult to all those who believe in democracy.

Paragraph (c) of the declaration contains the following false statement concerning the March 8, 2003 referendum result: "... more than 53 per cent of the eligible voters did not vote in favour of (EU) membership".

Not only is this statement cunningly worded in such a way as to mislead readers who are not familiar with details of the referendum result but the quoted percentage is false since there is absolutely no conceivable mathematical manipulation of the figures (valid or perverse) by which one can arrive at a figure of "more than 53 per cent of the eligible voters" who, the CNI claims, "did not vote in favour of membership".

For those readers who were taken in, here is a reminder of the result of last year's March 8 referendum: The number of registered voters was 297,881. The number of valid votes cast was 270,650 (90.86 per cent of registered voters). The number of people who did not vote was 27,231 and the number of invalid votes was 3,928. Of the valid votes, 143,094 (53.65 per cent) were in favour of EU membership and 123,628 (46.3 per cent) were against. There was thus a majority of 19,461 "yes" votes in favour of membership.

If one wants to cheat or deceive people, there are a number of ways to manipulate these figures to back up claims of a falsely high percentage of voters "not voting in favour of membership". If one were to consider every invalid vote (3,928) and every vote not cast (27,231) and add these to the valid (123,628) "no" votes, one arrives at a grand total of 154,787 of eligible voters who might then be conveniently labelled as "not in favour of membership" for the purposes of deception.

It is, of course, outrageous in the first place to claim that every single vote not cast and every invalid vote was "not in favour" of EU membership. However, if one now calculates, in percentage terms, how these 154,787 so-called "not in favour of membership" votes compare to the 143,094 "yes" votes, it yields a percentage of 51.96 per cent. Let us be generous and call it 52 per cent. So, even when one resorts to the most extreme and perverse mathematical distortion of the data, it is still a lower percentage than the "more than 53 per cent not in favour of membership" fabricated by the CNI for their declaration.

If CNI cannot (1) substantiate their published claim that "...more than 53 per cent of the eligible voters did not vote in favour of (EU) membership" and (2) provide evidence that all of the 27,231 eligible voters who did not cast their vote failed to do so because they consciously opposed EU membership and not for other reasons such as sickness or death, absence from the country, uncertainty or indifference etc., then it should be the duty of every Maltese citizen who is concerned about the misleading contents of the CNI declaration to bring this to the notice of the member states of the European Union and all members of the European parliament who are the intended recipients of the CNI's devious declaration. In this way a true perception of Malta's situation in respect of EU membership will be ensured.