I refer to Eddy Privitera’s letter “Who’s Right?” (December 3).

Privitera tries to explain to the reader that the Labour Party rightly obtained a nine-seat majority in Parliament in the last elections of 2013, following the corrective measure enabled by the Constitution providing for strict proportionate representation in Parliament.

He establishes an average weighting for each seat in Parliament at 3,918 votes. Unfortunately, he keeps the reader in the dark as to how he got to this average “quota”.

If one had to make a simple addition of the PN votes (132,426) and the PL votes 167, 533, together they would add up to 299,959 votes. With this amount (only PN votes and PL votes are put into the formula to work out the formula for the corrective measure), the average quota does not result in 3,918, as Privitera is claiming, but to 4,615.

This “average quota” is the total amount of votes of both parties (299,959) divided by 65, the original number of seats represented in Parliament.  With 167,533, the PL gets a total of 36.3 (30) seats (167,533/4,615), and the PN gets 28.7 (29) seats (132,426/4,615). This simple formula clearly shows a net difference of seven seats for the PL (36-29).

It is very clear that the skewed composition of the 13 electoral districts put together by the Electoral Commission gave a skewed result of six additional seats to the Labour Party: a 13-seat majority instead of a seven-seat majority.

In 2007 the Constitution was amended, on the insistence of the Labour Party, to provide for a better and more fine-tuned corrective measure that would give strict proportionate representation in Parliament to both the winning and the losing party. It is for this reason that the corrective measure according to the Constitution kicked in.

What the Constitutional Court did was justice to the will of the electorate, giving more importance to their vote than to the mistakes committed by the Commission that distorted the final result, giving the PN what was legitimately due to it: a net difference of seven-seat majority.

So, to his original question, of “Who’s right?”, my answer is: “Definitely not you, Mr Privitera!”

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