Michael Falzon (The Sunday Times, March 31,) maintains that our electoral system should be scrapped and that any constitutional reform should seriously consider the proposal for a “pure method of proportional representation”, which I believe could have been understood to reflect his earlier proposition that in accordance with such a system the last electoral result would have returned 36 seats to the Labour Party, 28 seats to the Nationalist Party and one seat to Alternattiva Demokratika.

Without going into the merits of whether our present electoral system should be totally overhauled, which would require quite a more in-depth study, I would like to stress that any such system should be designed to ensure political stability while ensuring adequate representation of minorities. However, it is also a fact that the Maltese system under-represents minorities.

It may well be that a party has 10 per cent or 15 per cent of the electoral vote and ends up not being represented in Parliament. Our system discourages the evolution of minor parties and it is difficult for a new party, aside from the traditional two large parties, to win parliamentary seats.

In order to ensure political stability, Resolution 1547 (2007) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends for parliamentary elections adopting strict proportional representation a threshold not higher than three per cent.

Examples of politically stable European countries include Germany which has a five per cent threshold, while Sweden and Norway adopt a four per cent threshold, though the latter two also allow a party with sufficient local support to possibly obtain parliamentary seats even if it does not meet the national threshold. However, in reality this was only achievable in Norway.

It is important to keep in mind that election thresholds can sometimes seriously affect the relation between the percentage of the popular vote and seat distribution since they can produce a spoiler effect, and if a party is perceived as having no chance of meeting the threshold, it will not gain enough popular support.

By comparison, elections involving the ranked voting system, used widely in Australia and Ireland make use of the complete voter’s indicated ranking preference. In fact, the single transferable vote system can factually redistribute votes for candidates below the threshold. Nobody would like his country to be in the situation of Italy which has a history of long periods of political instability. The present Maltese electoral system has managed to produce stable governments in Malta since 1961, perhaps with the exception of the last one, where a wafer-thin Nationalist majority in Parliament suffered defections from its very own members.

I believe that much thought and study would have to be given if our electoral system is overhauled in such an extensive manner.