It took this country close to 25 years to achieve strict proportionality when only two parties are elected. We have resolved the issue that first-count votes actually count most (incidentally, contrary to our declared system of the single transferable vote) and we now all agree that the first-count vote is equivalent to the voters' choice of governing party. We have also managed to amend our Constitution - in a not too elegant a fashion - in a way that, as long as two parties only get elected, strict proportionality - albeit with a House larger than 65 members - is ensured.
In this regard, it may be interesting to note that the various commissions that were set up during the last 25 years to solve this problem were mostly window-dressing to negotiations held face to face between party delegations who have always been the real movers of electoral reform.
However, as Lino Spiteri states, we still have a major problem of a skewed result if three parties get elected and keeping the House at 65 members is certainly eminently desirable.
For people who, like me, have been involved in this process, it is clear that the technical solution does not need to be invented since it exists and has been in place for decades in various European countries. It is called the D'Hondt system, which would allow - and I will not bore readers with technical details of how the maths works - us to retain the same ballot paper format, voters would vote in the same way as they do today and their vote would remain fully transferable as it is today. Parties would get exactly the same proportion of seats (following rounding of decimals) as they got first-count votes and, in order not to increase the House beyond 65 seats, you would elect four (not five) MPs from each district and use the 13 remaining seats (one from each district) to adjust the seat proportion in line with the first-count result.
All the parties agree that this system would be pretty good, so what is keeping us from adopting it? Two politically-loaded questions to which the Labour Party has never given an answer.
The first is the so called "threshold". Israel does not have a threshold, so any party getting a number of votes across the country equal to one seat in Parliament gets a seat in the House. In Malta that means that if Alternattiva Demokratika - from all Malta and Gozo - got 1/65 of the vote, or 1.5 per cent, of all valid first-count votes, or 4,361 votes in the last election (they actually got 3,810) they would get a seat in Parliament and we would probably have a hung Parliament.
A number of countries deem this to be undesirable, so they have put in a "threshold", a number that has to be achieved before a party qualifies for seats - could be three per cent, five per cent, seven per cent, or even higher. In all the discussions we have had to date both major parties agree on the need of a threshold while, obviously, AD does not. We have proposed a threshold of 7.5 per cent and we proposed this when Joe Saliba was still secretary general of the Nationalist Party. We are still waiting for a reply from the PL!
The second question is: What do you do with the votes of parties that do not make the threshold? If your threshold is 15,000 from all Malta and Gozo it is conceivable that small parties will not get past it but between them they could well have been given 20,000 first preference votes. Not having gone past that threshold you need to decide whether to declare those votes non-transferable (basically throw them in the trash) or else check them for continuing preferences on candidates of parties that have passed the threshold and transfer them accordingly.
Once again, when Mr Saliba was secretary general, we said our choice was to continue using those votes in valid transfer whenever they occur. Once again, we are still waiting for a reply from the PL.
There are no more issues to resolve in order to have a strict proportional representation system at all times. No commissions are required, merely two short answers from the new Labour Party.
Dr Gatt is Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications.