On May 16, the university IT Centre hosted the launch of the New Malta Elections Website, originally started by John Lane and has now been donated to the university.
Dominic Fenech, dean of the Department of History, gave a brief review of the electoral systems used in Malta between 1849 and 1921. Josef Lauri spoke about problems of proportionality and the new system of proportional representation introduced in Malta with the 1921 Self-Government Constitution. This system is used in many countries, mainly Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth countries and in Eire. Chris Terry spoke about the Proportional Representation Society and the STV while Mark Farrugia gave the audience a brief tour of the new website.
A lively discussion ensued on the subject of PR-STV, which is very topical. While some of the points were rather academic I think the following points are of practical and ongoing interest.
The system gives voters a say in the choice of the individual candidates, sometimes to the embarrassment of the party. The alphabetical order of the lists gives undue advantages and a first preference is often de facto equated to a secondary one.
The transfer of surpluses is effected physically on a top-of-the-pile basis. If the sorting process were restarted from scratch it could give a different numerical result.
Although the system is supposed to ensure proportionality between seats and votes it has often failed to do so. The most glaring example was in 1981 when the party with a majority of votes obtained a minority of seats.
Although the system is supposed to help the small parties, the proliferation of many small districts has in fact led to their practical elimination.
The instability of districts, or constituencies, led to gerrymandering, with a street from one village being pasted on to an unrelated village to exploit the “perverseness” of the quota system as computed at present.
In our system the “Droop Quota”, or the total number of valid votes cast in a district divided by the number of seats + 1 gives two bands of vote-split, especially with our entrenched two-party system, where proportionality does not apply. We have had many examples of this especially in the second district. This method presumes that a quota of votes in every district is lost.
Get your arithmetic right from the start
If the “Hare Quota”, which is the total number of votes cast in a district divided by the number of seats, which is the correct arithmetical computation, were used instead, the degree of proportionality would be very much improved and, as a result, ‘perverseness’ would be practically eliminated.
The districts should be stable and homogenous. The subdivision of north harbour (29 per cent), south harbour (19 per cent), north (15 per cent), western (14 per cent), south eastern (15 per cent) and Gozo (eight per cent), as used by the Central Office of Statistics, should be the permanent basis. The number of seats allotted to each district could be, say, one seat for every 5,000 registered voters, rounded off to the nearest whole number.
A “governance bonus” of say three seats over the number of seats obtained by the Opposition, should be given to the party with the highest number of No. 1 preferences to prevent obstruction by eventual small parties.
The present constitutional amendment allows a party to retain more seats than it is proportionally entitled to and redresses the balance by co-options resulting in unnecessary governance costs through honoraria, pensions, staff, allowances, overheads and ancillaries. Get your arithmetic right from the start.