Victor Scerri cannot be taken seriously when he claims that the recent agreement reached between the PN and the MLP on changes to the electoral law "guarantees that parties are assigned parliamentary seats in strict proportion to the number of votes achieved on a national level" (December 29). This is a blatant untruth and I find it difficult to believe that Dr Scerri can utter such an incredibly preposterous claim while keeping a straight face.

The truth is that the recent agreement guarantees strict proportionality between votes and parliamentary seats only for the PN and the MLP. This was made amply clear by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition when they stated that this strict proportionality amendment will be effective only if two parties are elected to Parliament.

In effect, not all political parties will be assigned seats in a strict proportion to the number of votes achieved on a national level as Dr Scerri is falsely claiming. Only those parties that manage to achieve 16 per cent of the votes in one electoral district will be granted this strict proportionality. Furthermore, this will come into effect only if two parties achieve this district threshold. Any other party, possibly winning thousands of votes on a national level but not achieving 16 per cent in one district, would be deprived of this strict proportionality and is robbed of parliamentary representation.

Dr Scerri has the cheek to call this "democracy at work, alive, healthy and in constant state of development".

A simple, hypothetical but practical example will clearly show the barefaced injustice being perpetuated by the PN and MLP.

Imagine an election where Party A wins 49 per cent, Party B 44 per cent and Party C seven per cent of first-count votes. Party A and Party B elect candidates through the 16 per cent district quota threshold while Party C does not.

According to the new changes, Party A and Party B will now be granted parliamentary seats to reflect in strict proportion the number of votes won on the first count. This change is particularly significant because while, in the previous system, the five percentage point advantage of Party A over Party B would probably not have been reflected in a strictly proportional advantage of parliamentary seats, this anomaly will now be removed. Thus, the five percentage point advantage of Party A over Party B will now be reflected in a three or four seat advantage in Parliament.

However, this strict proportionality is being denied to the seven per cent of voters who chose Party C. In fact, seven per cent of the electorate, translated into thousands of voters, are being disenfranchised of their right to parliamentary representation.

Dr Scerri has all the right to defend the changes he has helped engineer but he should at least respect the intelligence of the electorate and admit that the PN and MLP have granted to themselves strict proportionality between votes and seats while depriving this to others.

Once again, the PN and the MLP have blatantly tinkered with the STV (single transferable vote) electoral system to suit their own purposes. In this latest change being planned, they are proposing to remove the element of wasted votes which is a characteristic of our STV electoral system. This characteristic is linked to the manner in which the quota to be elected in a district is calculated. The system ensures that all parties waste a proportion of their votes due to the manner of this calculation. A fair electoral system should theoretically ensure that this wastage affects all parties in a proportionally equal manner.

In effect, the composition of electoral districts has a strong impact on this wastage proportionality, which explains why the regular changes in electoral districts are such a contentious issue. In fact, during most elections this vote wastage is not proportionally equal between all parties, leading to charges of gerrymandering of districts affecting the apportioning of seats in Parliament.

The PN and MLP are now proposing to do away with this problem once and for all. This would have been a positive thing had they had the courage to solve the problem for everyone, not just for themselves. By giving strict proportionality between votes and seats to themselves only, the PN and the MLP are removing for themselves only the element of vote wastage that previously used to affect all parties.

In simple terms, now every vote cast for the PN and the MLP will be represented proportionally as seats in Parliament, effectively bypassing the STV system, while the votes of all other parties will be wasted as they will continue to flounder in the "wastage" system of the STV. This is a blatant, anti-democratic injustice.

Dr Scerri conjures up apocalyptic visions of anarchy with small pressure groups, far-right extremists and sundry lobby groups holding the country to ransom if they get elected to Parliament with a strictly proportional system.

Once again, Dr Scerri should show greater respect towards the intelligence of his readers. He knows only too well that all initiatives pushing the idea of a strictly proportional electoral system always discussed the importance of introducing a national threshold clause that would qualify a political party to enter Parliament. In fact, it was the PN itself that proposed a five per cent national threshold of votes during the pre-1996 Gonzi Commission talks. This proposal was changed last year during the discussions held between the PN, the MLP and AD with the PN now proposing 7.5 per cent as a threshold.

The two proposals made by the PN itself clearly indicate that the PN is very much aware that obtaining a 16 per cent threshold in one electoral district to ensure parliamentary representation is unfair, unjust and anti-democratic. Dr Scerri has now committed a spectacular U-turn and is lauding the benefits of this impossibly high threshold.

Finally, Dr Scerri's paternalistic comments with regard to the representation of other political parties in Parliament dangerously ignore the other great fault underlying the new changes being proposed to the electoral law.

In their short-sighted, partisan and blinkered approach to the problem, the PN and the MLP are ignoring the possibility that, once a third political party is elected to Parliament, all the safeguards they are putting into place to ensure strict proportionality have to be thrown out of the window. They do not come into effect and neither do the 1986 and 1995 constitutional safeguards to avoid a perverse electoral result.

The risk therefore remains and, judging by the declarations made by the party leaders, such eventuality may be even more possible. This is linked to the fact that the PN and the MLP now seem to believe that the composition of districts will no longer have any bearing on the composition of Parliament. However, this will be the case only if two parties are elected to Parliament. Once a third political party is elected, the old STV system comes into play and, in a scenario where electoral districts are determined without taking into consideration the importance of a fair proportionality in vote wastage, the possibility of a perverse result is actually increasing and not decreasing. This confirms once again that in tinkering about with these electoral changes, the PN and the MLP are serving their own partisan ends and ignoring the national interest. Although 2006 has ended on a bleak note for those increasing number of Maltese and Gozitans who are sick and tired of the PN/MLP partisan stranglehold on local politics, I am confident that, like other countries, things will change in Malta too. More people have come to realise that change is possible and the power of the vote is a vehicle for such change. May 2007 be a year of courage and hope for all of us who are willing to use this power to bring about such change.

Mr Cachia is deputy chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

stephen.cachia@alternattiva.org.mt