Lauro Fava
KSU election misconceptions
I am mystified by the gross misinformation that spread following the annual general meeting of the University Student Council (KSU) last week. It seems the media did not bother much with fact verification in general. Nor was it necessary to describe the student electoral system, notwithstanding the irony that it would be far less time-consuming than to illustrate Pulse's complex proposal in all its glory.
Here are the facts.
At present there is no election en bloc. A "mixed" KSU is both possible and plausible under the system in place. It is not a matter of the student organisation that wins the highest number of votes automatically getting all 11 seats. On the contrary, the election is, in fact, 11 separate elections, one for each post, on a single ballot sheet. One could easily vote for the president of one organisation and the PRO of another.
This has happened before. For each individual post, the candidate winning the highest number of votes takes that individual post, with no impact on any of the other posts. Undemocratic? Unrepresentative? The only reason SDM got all 11 seats last year was because their candidates won each post, one by one.
For certain posts there were SDM candidates who came close to not being elected. There really were almost 600 mixed votes (students who voted for different candidates from different organisations).
Did SDM merit the chanting of monopolju (monopoly) and faxxisti (fascists) for having won past elections? Who is trying to manipulate the system here? Moreover, on the TX programme hosted by Miriam Dalli on March 17, Pulse president Tyson Fenech, albeit with a tone of uncertainty, denied that Pulse members erupted in the faxxisti chant. Could he have failed to witness the large number of Junior College students (two coaches full) in their bright orange Pulse T-shirts bellowing faxxisti at the SDM members present?
On the same TX programme, Pulse proponent Ryan Spagnol suggested that SDM candidates simply got into KSU by divine intervention. One would even be tempted to conclude that no election even takes place at the University. Two years ago, SDM won all 11 seats without an election simply because others, including Pulse, chose not to contest. This would happen in any other election.
I myself was present at the AGM. Students did leave the meeting and others entered. All students have a right to vote. If their IDs weren't checked, this only happened because Pulse themselves, together with other organisations such as Graffiti that are supporting the Pulse proposal, opted to elect a chairman who was clearly not fit for the job and failed to control the inflow of students. The KSU, together with SDM proponents, did not favour this chairman but had supported a different person who could have perhaps performed better. In all fairness, the poor chairman was doomed from the start. Few individuals can perform well while somebody is screaming and shouting in their face.
It was when Pulse realised that they almost had the required two-thirds majority, which would suffice to make any change to the statute (does this sound familiar?), that they called for amending the agenda in order to discuss their proposal before reading out the annual report, as usually happens. They feared that, if their proposal was discussed later, some of their members would have left. Then, again, SDM supporters would also have probably left.
Nevertheless, why would Pulse members leave the AGM if they so desperately wanted their proposal to pass? Why not stay for the whole meeting? Why make so much noise when a number of students having the right to vote were allowed to enter the AGM? They could have, after all, rallied those 3,000 students who they claimed signed their petition.
When they no longer felt they had the required majority they called for the meeting to be suspended. I suppose they realised at that stage that they would cause more havoc by making a lot of noise outside the AGM rather than staying at the meeting and convincing others that their proposed system should be adopted. How blissfully democratic.
The author is a former president of SDM, Maltese Christian Democrat Students.
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Victor Laiviera
Mar 30th, 22:42
This article is an exercise in pure sophistry. Yes, it is theoretically possible to have a "mixed" KSU. In practice it will never happen with the present anti-democratic system. Most students vote according to "party" lines and the block which has even one vote more will win all the seats - an utter obscenity in electoral/democratic terms.
What I find really worrying is that many of the students active in the KSU go on to become politicians - tomorrow's leaders. If the SDM activists have so little respect for the values of democracy at this young, supposedly idealistic age, what will they be like when they are older and even more cynical?
Jonathan Galea
Mar 29th 2010, 12:10
It seems that our 2-week long campaign about the electoral system reform did not reach your ears Mr. Fava, therefore allow me to explain and help you discover some technicalities you may have overlooked:
WE never said the system is undemocratic; whenever there is an election, there is a form of democracy. We only said that the system is NOT democratic and representative enough, because there is a large waste-factor when voting. This arises from the fact that as you stated, the candidates who lose are barred from being elected definitively, and we used the example of the election of last year, where the coalition ACT got 46% of the submitted votes and elected no one... 46% gone to waste, literally.
Therefore, the Mixed-Member proportionality system aims to reduce this waste factor, and the seats are apportioned according to the % of the votes obtained.
But hey, why am I bothering to explain all this, when SDM rejected the opinion of 3000 University students, though the petition, and of nearly 2/3s of the students present at the KSU AGM? That's where the nickname of "Monopolju" got derived.
Ryan Spagnol
Mar 29th 2010, 11:47
And to tell the whole truth, you should have never missed out your "friends" from the upper hierarchy calling us "Purcinelli" when we chose to leave the room. Nothing from you, not even how you chose to discuss the motion when this was withdrawn. Not even about the other proposal of KSU officials starting to get paid? Isn't that also an interesting part of what happened during the KSU AGM?
No need to tell you my friend, never count your chickens before they are hatched. Pulse have ample time to enhance its campaign and exploit all the rights granted by the statute to bring your opportunism down. You could easily end up with another defeat at the end of the day Mr Fava, just like you brought with your own hands in the last three years at the Junior College (two of them during your experience as SDM president).
Ryan Spagnol
Mar 29th 2010, 11:34
You really need to check your facts rights Mr Fava. Other points you failed to mention:
- SDM listed another two extra observers during the AGM, observers who weren't students and were there just to pass on their opinions to the SDM officials including Lauro Fava. No not observers, but SDM consultants.
- The chairman's role is to control the inflow of students, fair enough. How come several SDM members in their bright blue T-shirts continued their way into the room when the Chairman ordered them to leave the room and register themselves? Isn't this direspect to the Sedja and its authority?
- Ironically Lauro Fava is today attacking the chairman. Yes people, he is the same person who was shouting "Sedja, Sedja" in the footage shown by this website. You see Lauro Fava shouting and screaming here in fact:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100317/local/stormy-ksu-meeting-getting-nowhere
Wasn't that you Lauro who started the chant? Or were you still outside at that time? Oh, because he forgot to tell you that he wasn't at the AGM from its beginning. It was when SDM feared that there were enough individuals to approve the motion that he was called in to give his precious advice.
Ryan Spagnol
Mar 29th 2010, 11:21
Just to remind Mr Fava that when he was President of SDM he did the same. You walked out of the KSJC'c AGM Lauro, remember? Shall I waste my time repeating your question to you then?
Unfortunately you failed to mention the way you wanted to pass that motion that time round. The huge difference is that our motion was presented in the best way as required by the statute, SDM's wasn't.
When it comes to quoting me about SDM's "divine" ways of being elected in KSU, Lauro seems to have missed the whole point. Pity that he thinks the University students do not know everything of what happens behind the scenes of the electoral campaign!
Mr Fava and friends refer to Proportional representation as "popularity contests", yet they fail to explain how they contest the same system of popularity contests used in the way Local Councils are elected. Can Mr Fava explain how the present system is representative when you might have a situation where if for example 3 teams garner 35%, 34% and 31% of the votes respectively, only the 35% are represented in KSU?
Can he explain his absurd imagination of the other 65% (34%+31%) being represented?