Rod Donald, a leading member of the Green Party in New Zealand, has been repeatedly calling for the adoption of the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system in his country. The reasons he gives for this are interesting. He argues that the STV is not only fairer than the first-past-the-post system currently in use in New Zealand but furthermore this electoral system empowers the voters in a way that no other system does.

In Malta, only the Green party systematically attacks our STV electoral system which it calls undemocratic and retrograde because it sacrifices voters' wishes to the whims of the big parties! How ironic!

I would like to show that what our local Greens are claiming about the STV is nonsense. It is misleading to say that the STV system is intrinsically geared to penalise the candidates of small parties. It is wrong to argue that the presence of only two parties in the Maltese Parliament (unique in Europe) is directly caused by the STV. There are more than two parties in the House of Commons even though the first-past-the-post is, perhaps, the least proportional of all electoral systems. And the Republic of Ireland uses the STV like ours but there this system has lead to multiparty parliaments and numerous coalition governments. Indeed, the English had favoured the STV in Ireland in order to protect the Protestant minority.

One might thus wonder why in Malta there are only two parties in Parliament whereas in the Republic of Ireland there are more. What is certain is that the two-party system exists in Malta not because Maltese voters do not come upon other choices on the ballot paper but because they want it that way. Such a desire is indicated by the extremely low incidence of cross-party voting and the failure of new political parties to attract a substantial number of voters concentrated in one electoral division. And there is no reason to believe that the present-day mathematics of the Maltese version of STV would block the electoral success of a new or third party.

The oddity is that, while STV can be greeted as a system that allows preference-ranking irrespective of partisan alignments, preference-splitting still remains statistically rare in Malta. Indeed, with the STV a candidate with two per cent of first preference votes may succeed if he inherits enough votes in successive counts not only from candidates of his own party but also from other parties.

Geography also matters a lot. A trivial political party making a strong showing in just one district (perhaps a hypothetical Gozo Independence Party which is strong only in Gozo) can have one of its candidates elected even though the party's performance nationwide would be insignificant. The redesigning of the geographical boundaries of electoral divisions has many times wrought havoc in the fortunes of candidates.

Those who attack the STV usually point to the "wasted" votes which technically are called the non-transferable votes. This argumentation in a way reveals that they have never really come to grips with what preferential voting stands for in a system where what is important is not the political party per se but the candidate. In such a system even the so-called "wasted" votes have an important role to play. Unfortunately, the term "wasted" is a misnomer used by political pundits because it appeals to the imagination of voters. But the non-transferability of votes does express definite choices made by voters that can very much determine electoral outcomes - something that is impossible to do with proportional representation with party lists. This is one other added reason why many political scientists have suggested that the STV is one of the most effective instruments of democracy ever devised.

Irish small parties know this and Irish voters have learned that the STV system gives them the possibility to convey rich information about their preferences, to give primacy when voting on issues that cross party lines, to maximise their power to choose their representatives or to influence the direction that their favoured party should take by supporting particular candidates and not others.

Irish political parties have maximised the STV's potential by building bridges, helping in coalitions and nourishing contacts at the community level in the countryside and thus managing to win enough sympathy that is reflected in cross-party voting on the ballot sheets.

On this last point Alternattiva Demokratika's efforts in the past have proved futile. However, instead of admitting their failures, our local Greens demonised the big parties and invented the myth of the intrinsically unjust political system. Their pride reached exhilarating heights and many so-called intellectuals have convinced themselves that voting for the third party means that you are culturally advanced while voting for the big parties means being retrograde and dumb-headed.

With this negative attitude at the back of their heads the Greens proceed to attack the STV because it symbolises a particular kind of culture. Unlike the small political parties before 1966, the contemporary small parties largely lack those community level contacts so typical in close-knit societies such as Malta and Ireland. The opposite can be said of the MLP and PN candidates. You can see these people attending village feasts, touring village clubs, knocking doors, hugging women at coffee mornings, handing out hampers at bazaars, being present at parish activities and making it a point to be seen in the church pjazza on Sundays. I know an MP who attends all the funerals at the parish church of his native constituency.

The candidates have to meet their constituents because in our system voters are choosing between candidates rather than between parties. The STV consequently puts a lot of constraints on the politician and candidates are forced to spend much of their personal time responding to individual and community grievances by their constituents, which is necessary for electoral survival.

The obvious effect is that STV prevents MPs from becoming detached from their constituents and that voters can identify with a representative they personally helped to elect and can feel affinity to. This is especially the case in Malta where the multi-member electoral districts are relatively small ensuring that the most likely MPs to be elected are those who touch daily people's lives.

In a nutshell the STV is the system that a close-knit society such as Malta simply loves. The Maltese Greens simply do not want to accept that their continuous misfortune at the polls is that, despite whatever they say, they have not penetrated the socio-political ethos of our society.

It would be unfortunate if the present STV system in Malta be undermined further. Paradoxically such proposals are coming precisely from that political party which champions itself as the archenemy of what it labels the partitokrazija dictatorship. In proposing electoral changes that will undermine pure STV, these chaps will severely hamper the extraodinary powers that the pure STV gives to constituents over political parties.

The very amendments the Greens are pushing for would leave constituents at the mercy of party bureaucrats! The Maltese Greens should rather learn from the Irish example (and their Kiwi colleagues) and realise that the STV is the best and most democratic electoral system around. It would be unwarranted vandalism to mutilate such a system.

We must protect the single transferable vote at all costs: It is the jewel in our crown.

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