[This
article is addressed:
* to the YashGhai Commission
*
political parties in Fiji (old and new)
* those intending
to make submissions on possible reforms to the electoral system, and
* those interested
voter educationin the run-up to the elections.
It would
be useful for the Ghai Commission to publicise an email and a Skype address so citizens
(abroad or locally) can communicate their views to them, without being in Fiji in
person.]
There is consensus
that the electoral system in the 1997 Constitution must be changed and a system
without any ethnic constituencies, as the Regime insists, will be an
improvement.
The weaknesses of
the current system are many and I won't repeat them here. Interested readers
can look at my analysis of the 2001 elections.
The current system
is not unfair on ethnic grounds. See this article examining the results of the
2006 elections from an ethnic perspective.
The real weakness in
the results is that small parties with reasonable national, but scattered,
support are not likely to win in any one constituency, and so are
under-represented or totally unrepresented in parliament.
A practical
weakness was that it was extremely difficult to explain the system to ordinary
voters, leading to high percentages of invalid votes.
There is an annex
at the bottom of this article, which the Ghai Commission might look at, on my
politically neutral educating attempt in 2005, and how this 2005 practical
workshop exercise could be easily replicated, for a new electoral system, to
reduce invalid voting.
Both these sets of
weaknesses will be reduced by a simple "proportional" system, which
gives each party the same share of seats in parliament, as its share of votes
nationally (allowing for Independents).
The Party does not even have to win a single seat in a local
constituency.
There is also
consensus that Fiji should try a "List" element which will have two
very important advantages for Fiji.
First it will help
to elect larger numbers of women by forcing Parties to put women candidates
high on the Party List (which every voter will see before the election).
Second, parties
will be able to bring capable people into parliament, without having to be
elected in any particular constituency.
A third advantage
of the proportional system is that electoral boundaries will become totally
unimportant: there will be no incentive for parties to try to manipulate
electoral boundaries(as they used to in 199, 2001 and 2006).
A fourth advantage
is that the results will be extremely predictable - even if any new party comes
on the scene.
There is no one
perfect system: all systems have some advantages, some faults.
This article suggests
recommends a system that is relatively simple to understand and operationalize.
Readers are advised to go through the arithmetic examples in a group, for
discussion and easier understanding.
The system in operation
This is a simple
working example based on 50 seats in Parliament: 25 for local constituencies;
and 25 from the List part. You can easily change the total number.
If you cannot
understand the simple arithmetic, get your secondary school children to explain
to you.
Each voter will get
2 ballot papers: one for the local constituency, and one for the national party
of choice.
The National Ballot
paper containing the list of all the political parties, is the most important
vote, which will determine how many seats each party will have in total in
Parliament (in addition to any Independents who may be elected at the local
constituency level), adding up to 50.
Local
constituencies will elect 25.
The Party List will
then provide 25 to ensure that the totals are as determined by the national party
vote..
Election for the local constituency
Every electoral
system in the world has local parliamentarians whose primary responsibility
is to serve the local constituency needs in roads, bridges, electricity,
health, jetties, investment projects etc.
If they don't
perform, voters don't vote for them the next time.
We can imagine the
same 25 "open" constituencies that were used in the 2006 elections:
no ethnicity criterion for either candidates or voters (except to be over the
age of 18).
You will not get hundreds of names on any one ballot
paper (as the current NCBBF/David Arms proposal for only four large
constituencies would give you, leading to a total confusing mess at election
and counting time).
The ballot paper
will only have the names for the candidates for that constituency, in random
order, with their party symbols (Independents allowed).
The voters will
place numbers in order of preference of candidates: 1, 2, 3, etc so that if the first preference candidate
does not win, that vote is not wasted but goes to the second preference, etc.
Voters can use
their own personal preference order,or use the ones their party gives
them. But the voter decides in the
secrecy of the voting booth, not the political party (i.e. no confusing "above
the line" or "below the line" nonsense).
Voters can stop at
any number, without the vote being disqualified- that vote would simply not be
counted further if the preference counting goes beyond that number. So advise
voters to fill in all the numbers.
The winner is the
candidate who manages to win 50% of the votes, either on the first count, or
following the counting of preferences.
For example, the
following could be the result for the 25 local constituencies:
Table
1
Party
|
(A)
Local
seats
won
|
(B)
List seats entitled
|
(C)
Total seats
entitled
|
(D)
Perc. of
National party votes
|
Party A
|
10
|
|||
Party B
|
7
|
|||
Party C
|
6
|
|||
Party D
|
0
|
|||
Independents
|
2
|
|||
Total
|
25
|
25
|
50
|
100%
|
The national result for parties
Each voter uses the
National Ballot paper (which has all the political parties on it) to tick
against his or her party of choice. No
numbers are required.
These National Ballot
papers are counted and aggregated throughout the whole country to get each party's
share of the total votes- eg. as in Column D:this is the most important
column, more important than A.
Table
2
Party
|
(A)
Local seats
won
|
(B)
List seats entitled
|
(C)
Total seats
entitled
|
(D)
Perc. of
National party votes
|
Party A
|
10
|
19
|
40%
|
|
Party B
|
7
|
17
|
35%
|
|
Party C
|
6
|
10
|
20%
|
|
Party D
|
0
|
2
|
5%
|
|
Independents
|
2
|
(2)
|
||
Total
|
25
|
25
|
50
|
100%
|
You have 48 seats
to distribute between the Parties, because of the 2 seats won by Independents.
Those percentage
shares in Column D, multiplied by 48 seats then gives you each Party's total number
of seats entitled in parliament (here in Column C).
In the example
here, Party A is entitled to (40% of
48) = 19 seats altogether.
Party B is
entitled to (35% of 48) = 17 seats altogether.
With a total of 50
seats in parliament, any party that can get a minimum of 2% of all the national
votes (roughly 12,000 votes), will get one seat in Parliament.
In other
word, Column D is the target for all political parties: what percentage of national votes will they
get?
If they appeal only
to one ethnic group- they will be limited by the numbers in that ethnic group.
Any party which can
appeal to all the ethnic groups, will have larger percentages in column D,
hence larger numbers in parliament. FULL STOP.
So it does not
matter at all (except to the Independents) how many seats the party won in the
Local Constituencies!
Because Column B (=
Column C minus Column A) will then give you the number of parliamentarians
coming from the "Party List" by simple subtraction: the total in
parliament stays the same- as in Column C.
The Party List
Every political
party will publish a "List" of their candidates in order of
importance, at the closing date of nomination of candidates i.e. before the
elections (there will be no surprises sprung on voters).
The List must start
with their Leader, who will be Prime Minister if that Party forms Government.
(Let there be no doubt about that,as there was in the 1999 elections,
remember?)
The party will be
expected to put names of their candidates in their order of importance.The
public will be able to see clearly from the order in the List,
(a) how
multi-racial the party is
(b) how much
importance they give to women at the top?
(c) how regionally
representative this party is? Viti Levu? Vanua Levu? urban? rural? etc.
Since Party A won
10 local seats, and is entitled to a total of 19 seats in Parliament, they will
get the remaining 9 candidates from the top of their List, in order, elected
into Parliament.
Since Party B won 7
local seats, and are entitled to 17 in Parliament, then will now pick 10 from
their Party List.
Note that Party D
did not win a single seat in the Local constituencies, but gets 2 seats from
the List, because they got 5% of all the votes in the country.
They do not have
the total freedom to select who they want.
They must work down the List, in order.
Table
3
Party
|
(A)
Local seats
won
|
(B)
List
seats entitled
|
(C)
Total seats
entitled
|
(D)
Perc. of
National party votes
|
Party A
|
10
|
9
|
19
|
40%
|
Party B
|
7
|
10
|
17
|
35%
|
Party C
|
6
|
4
|
10
|
20%
|
Party D
|
0
|
2
|
2
|
5%
|
Independents
|
2
|
0
|
2
|
|
Total
|
25
|
25
|
50
|
100%
|
If any local
constituency winners are already on that List (and they can be), they are
simply skipped over.
Party List will encourage Gender Balance in Parliament:
MDG Target
All Pacific
countries, including Fiji, are totally failing the MDG target of having gender
balance in Parliament.
Women generally are
reluctant to go on the campaign trail for all the usual reasons, and voters
often are reluctant to elect women parliamentarians, for all the usual reasons.
The List system
will force political parties, to women candidates, fairly distributed at the
top of the list, to make sure that there is gender balance in parliament,
without women having to win in local constituencies.
The List system
will also give political parties the ability to introduce good candidates
into parliament, even if they do not stand, even if they are not selected, or if
they are not elected from a local constituency.
A certain
Taufa Vakatale will remember this bitter experience.
If a Party puts
undeserving candidates at the top of their List, they will lose voters.
Absolutely no need for Electoral Boundary manipulation
This system will
have the huge advantage that it will not matter at all where the
boundaries are, as all votes for any party will be counted, wherever the voters
are, and no party's votes are wasted, even if their local candidate is not elected.
This will totally
eliminate all the political nonsense that used to go in the Electoral
Boundaries Commission where political party representatives used to try to move
a boundary this way and that in order to win some local constituency.
There will be big
saving in costs for the Electoral Office and the Fiji Bureau of Statistics, who
traditionally had to go through these laborious boundary exercises, trying to
satisfy ridiculous criteria such as ensuring reasonable proportions of ethnic
groups in each constituency. All of that
can be chucked out the window.
I recollect from my
own 1999 experience how illogical many boundaries were, especially in urban
Suva.
There is also no
need to even make constituencies around the same size, since the national votes
are all aggregated, from big and small constituencies.
The boundaries can
be designed primarily to make it convenient for the local elected member to
serve his/her constituencies, without any confusion, although you would not
make them too small or too large in number.
Once boundaries are
defined, the Electoral Boundaries Commission can go into hibernation, unless there
is a need to increase the number of constituencies because of population
movement.
Minor arithmetic problems
If you experiment with different examples, you find small arithmetic
difficulties on how to determine proportional seats where parties are entitled
to fractions of a seat.
e.g. 10.8 or 7.6
or 4.9
A simple rule is to
choose the highest fractions, just enough to ensure that
(a) the total seats
in parliament, including the Independents, add up to 50; and
(b) the total in
the List column adds up to 25.
Predicting the future?
It will be very
simple to predict how many seats each Party, old or new, will winunder the
system.
The easiest (and cheapest)
way
is to start with the 2006 Open Constituency percentage results for SDL (47%),
FLP (42%), NFP (7%), NAP (4%), PANU (1%).
You can even add a new
party - let us call it NPBBF (National Party for Building a Better Fiji), led by
You-Know-Who.
You can make an
intelligent guess how much support (in percentage points) NPBBF will draw away
from each of the other parties, and reduce the other parties' percentage
support accordingly.
OR, if you want to
be really scientific (like the Gallup Polls etc) you can spend some money to
conduct a small random sample survey of all the rural and urban constituencies,
and adults over the age of 18, to find which party they would vote for. A small
sample of 3000 households would be very accurate indeed. Tebbutt Poll or some
university entrepreneur could do it easily, using some help from the Fiji
Bureau of Statistics household survey unit.
Put the revised
percentages in column D in my Table 3 above, then just work out Column Cas
"percent of 50"(assume 0 Independents).
Column C will then give
you the final result in Parliament, with each party's numbers exactly in proportion to their percentage
support in the country.
You don't need to
worry at all about Column A and who gets elected in individual constituencies:
regardless of how many are won by each party in the local constituencies, the
total number in Parliament remains the same- as in Column C.
Only the number
from the List will change.
Simple, isn't it?
Multi-party government?
The Ghai Commission
should be advised by all political parties, not to interfere with the
multi-party government provision in the 1997 Constitution (as the NCBBF very
unwisely did).
The only change required
would be the minimum number of seats required to eligible to be invited into
Cabinet: 10% of 50 seats will give you a minimum of 5 seats.
While Fiji's
political leaders failed to make use of this mechanism in 1999 (Chaudhry) and
2001 (Qarase), it was being made to work in 2006 (by Qarase), until cut short
by the 2006 coup.
Planners of any new
parties should remember that it is relatively easy to get the minimum of 5
seats (or 10% of national votes) which would give them the right to be invited
into Cabinet.
It is much harder
to get 50% of all votes through secret ballots which a party would need to form
government on its own.
It would be useful
for all the political parties in Fiji to first discuss amongst themselves,
perhaps facilitated and moderated by independent advisers, what they would like
to see in the revised electoral system, given their experiences in the past.
A broad political
agreement and a consensus set of recommendations to the Ghai Commission should also facilitate and encourage the Ghai
Commission to report quickly and with some degree of confidence to the
Constituent Assembly.
Annex: Suggestions to the Ghai
Commission for Voter Education Campaign
Having seen the
poor performance of the electoral system in 1999 and 2001, I developed in 2005,
a more detailed and hands-on voter education training kit for the Fiji
Elections Office. I used these in workshops
held in Suva, Lautoka and Labasa, for voters, district officers, and returning
officers.
These
"hands-on" voter education kits used simple language and cartoons to
explain (a) the workings of the Alternative Vote Electoral system (b) the
establishment of the multi-party government and Senate after the elections, and
(c) as well as all the good governance issues associated with a democratic
electoral system.
Essentially: the
work-shop participants individually or in groups, acted like Returning
Officers, and actually counted the votes in 5 model elections, transferring
preferences where needed, in order to identify the "winners" for each
constituency.
This was extremely
useful in understanding how that complex system worked.
Thetraining manuals
and the accompanying sets of Ballot Papers that go with the exercise, may be
seen at the USP Library.
It will be miles
simpler with the electoral system I am proposing here.
What the Ghai Commission could do
A comparable workshop training kit for the electoral system that I am proposing
here (or some variation of it which is a compromise with the NCBBF/David Arms
system) would be relatively easy to devise and agree on.
All the political
parties could be taken through a national workshop to ensure that they fully
understand how the system will work. Their election campaigns can then focus
totally on their policies for development and good governance.
The voter education
materials could be printed, within three months of the Electoral System being
approved by the Constituent Assembly (and this could easily be the first task
achieved by the Ghai Commission, as the NCBBF committees have already discussed
alternatives in 2008).
The whole of Fiji
could be made familiar with such a system, in just three months of workshops
and media campaigns, with the co-ordination of NGOs and "good
governance" international institutions, all completed by March of 2013.
The public media campaign would just show two colour
coded ballot papers that all voters would fill out (if they wish):
1. Green National
Ballot paper: Tick against the party you want (only a tick).
2. Yellow Local
constituency paper: Write down the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc against the
candidates.
With such an easy system, the elections could be
easily held by June 2013.
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