Michael Falzon, Labour Member Of Parliament

The Maltese people have trusted the present administration with the strongest parliamentary majority since independence. Even following the latest court judgment, a situation of the widest margin ever remains unchanged. Away from euphoric celebrations, one can cast no doubt on the government’s firm mandate to keep delivering positive changes.

Undoubtedly, there are those who question how a majority of 13,000 votes in the 2003 general election resulted in a five-seat majority and how a 36,000-vote majority in 2013 is translating itself, by court order, into a seven-seat majority.

There is one thing the latest judgment confirmed - the indisputable fact that there is nothing devised by human beings that is completely foolproof. Electoral systems are no exception and, indeed, the same is true of court judgments.

Our electoral system is based on the principle of each registered voter having a single transferable vote. The system was originally handed down by the then British colonisers in the early 1920s, with one of its aims being precisely that of the proverbial ‘divide and rule’.

The system is based on people voting for individuals and not for parties and it was precisely intended to fragmentise the electoral wishes of the Maltese as much as possible. The system allowed voters to choose individuals having different political beliefs; what is nowadays termed as cross-party voting.

However, over the years, the Maltese cloned the system to suit their own political realities and, despite the fact that, until the 1980s, our electoral law had absolutely no mention of the word ‘party’, the local political scene has been consistently dominated by two major political parties.

Electoral systems, aimed to serve people, cannot remain static and, indeed, over these last 30 years, in particular, we have witnessed our electoral system evolving further and relatively faster, for it to reflect better the political scenario.

The first time our electoral law introduced the concept of a political party was in the 1980s, following the result of the 1981 election. That situation led to the introduction of political parties into our electoral law and the consequent absolute majority first-count votes rule. This crucial development led to absolute majority rule, as opposed to the parliamentary seats rule, which had been with us since the 1920s.

After the introduction of the absolute majority rule in the 1980s came the introduction of the relative majority rule in the 1990s. More recently, followed the establishment of Gozo as an electoral ‘region’ as opposed to an electoral district and, more significantly, the rule of strict proportionality between the first count votes and the parliamentary seats assigned to political parties.

The strict proportionality mechanism in our electoral system is aimed at ensuring that whatever the electoral result and whatever the composition of electoral districts drawn up, they will have no bearing on who will govern and by what majority of seats. This mechanism laid to rest the decades-long controversies linked to the drawing up of electoral districts, which had led to various accusations of gerrymandering.

By venturing into human error during the counting process as opposed to the issue of legality or, rather, constitutionality, the latest court judgment has led to the question as to whether our system is indeed as foolproof as we had intended it to be after the last constitutional amendments were made.

There is nothing stopping us trying to adapt and change our system further to reflect our political realities better, based on a wide political consensus, which is more likely to be achieved when elections are a thing of the relatively ‘far’ rather than the relatively ‘near’ future.

Yet, one thing is for sure. The historic majority of 36,000 votes cannot be erased. While the Opposition is still pondering over last election’s result, the government is fully focused on working harder for the success of our families and businesses, to eventually face the Maltese people in a humble manner for another vote of confidence in the next election.

Paul Borg Olivier, Lawyer

The phrase that summarised the judgment of the Constitutional Court is that “elections are decided by the electors and not by those who count the votes”. This is very similar to what Ian Refalo had said in 2008 at a conference held by the Venice Convention on Elections but which was left out of the equation by the Electoral Commission during the case.

All elections provide for corrective procedures during the counting process. No system is foolproof. Measures vary from one system to another.

What really needs to be done is for the Electoral Commission to be more diligent all through the process, from the composition of electoral boundaries to the counting process. The 2013 election produced the most distorted result since 1981. It gave the Labour Party a 13-seat majority instead of seven in Parliament – six more than what was due according to the popular vote.

The Constitution provides for the single transferable vote system of elections, allowing voters to give their preference, in numerical order, to their preferred candidates. The choice of the elector is not lost on first preference or on the choice of one candidate. The vote has a multiple use that can be inherited and transferred from on candidate to another and even from one party to another.

The major breakthrough happened with the constitutional amendment in 1987 of popular majority rule. It was aimed at avoiding perverse results caused by the manipulation of electoral districts that give a party a parliamentary majority without the backing of the majority of the people.

In 1996 and 2007, other amendments were introduced to fine-tune the process in such a way as to guarantee, as far as possible, strict proportionate representation in the composition of Parliament that reflects the votes obtained in an election by both the majority and the minority parties. This process - the corrective mechanism - is provided for by a precise mathematical formula taking into account the number of first preferences obtained by each party represented in Parliament and the number of candidates elected on final count.

It is this process that the Constitutional Court protected through its judgment, declaring also that the mistakes committed by the Electoral Commission could have been rectified by it and that its failure to do so distorted the result to a grave extent causing serious prejudice and breaching the right of the Nationalist Party to a free and fair election according the European Convention of Human Rights.

Throughout the case, the Labour Party did not spare itself from illegitimate and unethical means to delay a final judgment. Undoubtedly, the Prime Minster and the Labour Party are jointly guilty of delaying justice at the expense of democracy and the rule of law.

Labour claims the judgment has set a serious precedent in our electoral system. On the contrary, what the Constitutional Court did was protect the system and the corrective mechanism safeguarded by the Constitution. An attempt to change this would be a serious blow to the positive constitutional developments of the last 30 years.

The dirty tricks continue. The Labour Party keeps attacking the court, claiming it was biased, targeting the presiding judges and questioning the outcome of the judgment with unfounded half-truths and legal inaccuracies.

From now on, there are immediate actions that need to be taken seriously.

Firstly, Joseph Muscat needs to apologise for the delays and attack on our judicial system. Secondly, he must send back the new draft electoral boundaries presented to him by the Electoral Commission as these give rise to a more distorted result than that in 2013. Thirdly, the Electoral Commission needs to be bolder in its approach by being more vigilant and determined to solve problems when faced with them rather than passing the buck to the Constitutional Court.