The casual elections are now over with the usual surprises and disappointments they invariably produce. Unbelievably, it took us all of six weeks since polling day to know all the names of the people elected to Parliament.

Our electoral system had originally been designed to elect representatives to an assembly but it has been tweaked three times to force it to produce political parties in government and in opposition. Some of the unintended side effects of these 'corrections' leave me speechless.

As everybody should recall, the constitutional corrective mechanism giving the party with only a relative majority of first preference votes a majority of seats, is only triggered in the case of only two parties having elected members in the House of Representatives. In fact, last month the Electoral Commission waited until all the 65 seats were elected before it applied the relevant Constitutional provision and awarded an extra four seats to the PN. It was only then that the official result gave the go-ahead for Lawrence Gonzi to be sworn in as Prime Minister.

Casual election rules do not restrict the choice of the member to be elected such that he or she must belong to the party of the elected candidate whose seat has been vacated. Although it was quite impossible in practice, there was no rule that stopped Harry Vassallo from winning the seat vacated by the PN in the tenth district. This was only a matter of the preferences cast in the ballot papers in the 'packet' of ballot papers that gave a seat to Dolores Cristina - who then proceeded to vacate it as she had also been elected from another district.

In this scenario, the House of Representatives would have ended up with MPs from three parties. Would the Electoral Commission have then been obliged to reverse its decision giving four extra seats to the PN? Would the President have had to cancel Lawrence Gonzi's appointment as Prime Minister and appoint Alfred Sant in his stead? The mind boggles.

Just imagine: all the flak about the 'lost election' that was spouted by so many Labour spokesmen would have had to be forgotten with Sant leading a united Labour administration. This, after reversing his irrevocable decision to resign. Imagine all the compliments heaped on Gonzi having to be withdrawn with his political future suddenly in the balance.

This is the stuff of fantasy, but theoretically the system allows for it.

I long ago went on record in favour of scrapping the currently electoral system altogether and I hope to have the opportunity to write more about my ideas about this in the future.

Casual elections - that are not really elections - are very peculiar animals that produce peculiar results. The reason for this is that the process is not aimed at electing the next popular candidate in a district but rather the most popular - among those 'contesting' - according to the preferences in the 'packet' of ballots that led to the election of the candidate whose seat is vacant.

Unelected candidates who had garnered substantial votes and survived the electoral 'race' until the last counts invariably find themselves at a disadvantage as the preferences for them in a particular candidate's packet of ballot papers do not reflect the situation of their popularity in all the district. A casual election might involve the opening of a packet of ballot papers that could have been closed before a particular candidate was eliminated or that was closed after surplus votes from his tally were removed. In both cases the position of any given candidate does not reflect the entire voting pattern of the electorate.

I am sure that a month after the election, the great majority of voters do not recall to whom they gave their preferences after the first three numbers. Yet it is those forgotten sixes and sevens (or even nines and tens) that determine who gets elected in a casual election.

One peculiar aspect that shows how much pot luck there is in casual elections is the distribution of surplus votes when a candidate is elected on the first count after getting more votes than the quota needed to be declared elected. The distribution is worked out between different candidates according to the proportion of the second preferences they obtained in the ballots that gave the elected candidate more first preference votes than the established quota. For the purpose of this exercise, the other preferences - from 3 onwards - are completely ignored as such a consideration would be impractical. Yet these ignored preferences 'thrown in the pot' without rhyme or reason could eventually determine who is declared elected through a casual election.

Another strange thing occurs when the candidates contest two casual elections in two different districts announced in the same writ - as was the case last Thursday in Districts II and III; IX and X as well as in districts XI and XII. In order to avoid having the same person being elected in two seats via a casual election, the counting processes of the two casual elections are not carried out concurrently and in the second district to be 'counted', the candidate elected in the first district is eliminated as if he is not contesting at all. Clearly, the composition of Parliament depends on the order in which the casual 'elections' take place as reversing the order of districts could lead to the election of two different sets of candidates. How does the Electoral Commission decide which district it 'counts' first? By tossing a coin. In fact, last Thursday, the Electoral Commission tossed three. The democratic principles sustained by coin tossing are beyond me.

The electoral system should do away with casual elections altogether, first by not allowing candidates to stand in two districts in the election proper. Except for the five-day ego trip of whoever is elected in two districts, the system only serves to limit the pool of available MPs when the newly elected Prime Minister appoints his Cabinet.

micfal@maltanet.net

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