The results of the election four weeks ago show beyond any reasonable doubt that our electoral system should be scrapped – something that I have always believed privately and have been publicly maintaining for over eight years.
We should think about adopting a pure method of proportional representation which is the D’Hondt system
We now have irrefutable proof that the only law our system actually obeys is Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We have had tales of human errors – genuine or otherwise – with seats going to one party rather than another over a handful of votes when a larger number of ballot papers seem to have gone missing. We have even heard the argument that mistakes are inevitable and all we have to do is to lump it.
With a system that really reflects the voting pattern of the electorate a Parliament of 65 seats would have given us this result: Labour (55 per cent) – 36 seats; PN (43 per cent) – 28 seats; AD (two per cent) – one seat. Instead the system turned up with Labour 39 seats to the PN’s 26.
The PN was then assigned an extra four seats to restore the ratio between Labour’s and the PN’s votes, 55 per cent: 43 per cent.
With 55 per cent being set at 39 (as luck would have it), 43 per cent means that the nearest whole number to respect the ratio is 30.
This adjustment, however, applies when only two parties are represented in Parliament. Had AD garnered a seat, the distribution of seats would not have been disturbed. In that case, only mathematical perversity would have been respected. Anybody who embarks on the search for mathematical logic in how the seats in the next Parliament have been won is on a wild goose chase.
An apparently obvious point is that with the latest tweaks in our system, the need for the electoral districts to be within 10 per cent of the average is superfluous. This has already been rendered superfluous in the case of Gozo where size does not matter as it is predestined to remain one whole district.
Theoretically, this should not result in any advantage to Gozitans, because of the corrections applicable so long as no third party gets a seat. Yet as it turned out in practice, Gozo is over-represented in the next House of Representatives with six seats out of 69 – a veritable 8.7 per cent which is far larger than its percentage of the total population of the Maltese islands.
Had the above mentioned adjustment not been applied, Gozo would have had five seats out of 65 which translate into 7.7 per cent. This is still larger than its percentage of the electorate.
The special provision for Gozo has undermined the very idea of proportionality and something must be done about it. One can argue that we could have all districts to be permanent – just like Gozo now is – with the number of seats elected by each district varying according to the shifts in the number of voters.
Instead of our current system, we should think about adopting a pure method of proportional representation which is the D’Hondt system – named after Belgian mathematician Victor D’Hondt – that allocates seats to parties in the strictest possible proportion.
This system had been proposed by the commission headed by Lawrence Gonzi (then Speaker) in the early 1990s to allocate seats to parties that achieve a national threshold of votes. Instead, we stuck to our perverse way of doing things.
The idea of adding MPs in order to restore some sort of balance reflecting the wish of the electorate would be eliminated. Candidates would not be allowed to stand in two districts, thus eliminating the need for casual elections that are required for the full list of MPs to be established and also giving the elected Prime Minister a wider range of MPs from whom to appoint the Cabinet.
Today, I am tending to conclude that in such a small country like Malta the division into electoral boundaries is artificial and that we should do away with electoral districts altogether. Malta and Gozo, as has been suggested, could be one electoral division.
Moreover a mixed system with pre-established party lists apart from individual candidates is also indicated. The parties have been losing too many valid MPs because of mundane reasons and having the possibility of some making it through the party list should not be discarded.
Incidentally, apart from its slick electoral campaign at a national level, Labour seems to have pushed for certain particular candidates with an eye for possible appointees for Cabinet posts. If this is correct, then the idea of party lists would be less messy.
Of course, with the introduction of party lists giving an order of importance to candidates, our political parties would have many controversial internal problems to surmount. But this is done in so many countries, that I do not think we cannot overcome such difficulties.
With all the current talk of constitutional reform, scrapping our present electoral system and adopting a new approach on how we elect our MPs should be seriously considered.
I have no doubt that ignoring this issue should not be an option.
micfal@maltanet.net