Electoral system can make or break our democracy
By S. M. McDoom
IF ELECTIONS are to be held by January 17, 2001, Guyana and more particularly the January 13, 2000 task force from the Constitution Reform Oversight Committee will have to bite the bullet of electoral reform very shortly. The electoral system is of course not just one component in a constitution. It is the means by which citizens nationwide choose their representatives to represent them in (potentially) all the affairs of the nation. The rest of the constitution are the basic laws/principles which those representatives among others, must observe. The representatives can function ad hoc without those laws/principles, but no democratic country can function without representatives. Some countries have no codified constitution, but all democratic countries have a codified electoral system. Hence no one should be labouring under the delusion that we have gone very far in the process of constitutional reform just yet, certainly not until we have settled our electoral system. It was from this perspective and also due to the political reality that I had suggested without success that the Constitution Reform Commission (CRC) should address the electoral system first in the process of constitutional reform. The national electoral system can make or break our democracy. It is so important that to entrust the choice of electoral system to foreign experts or even to rely on their recommendations in order to choose is an abdication of sovereignty. It should not even be left to politicians many of whom are motivated by short-term electoral advantage rather than long-term stability. Experts should only tell us of the systems elsewhere and their pitfalls etc. We have to study what is available and decide what is best for us in the context of Guyana, and there is no earthly reason that we should not be innovative. The CRC recommended by consensus that the electoral system should ensure the closest to possible proportionality of seats to votes. By a separate subsequent resolution, the CRC also voted that the system should include "an element of geographical representation". Both the Staboek News reports (e.g. 13/9/99) that the CRC vote for this geographical representation element was 19 in favour with one abstention and the Guyana Chronicle's reports that the vote was unanimous, were untrue. Some over-enthusiastic proponent of geographical representation misled both newspapers. As the CRC report states (Page 21) I alone voted against. I make that clear for what it is worth. And in the debate, I gave several reasons why in the context of Guyana, geographical representation was unnecessary, undesirable and inappropriate. It may be pertinent to repeat those reasons now. Firstly, were these two resolutions incompatible? Geographical representation necessarily entails division of the country into constituencies with the number of voters in each constituency changing every time someone dies, becomes 18 years old, moves, migrate or remigrates, or builds a house etc. More importantly, those voters who vote for the losing candidate/s in a constituency have nil effect on the translation of votes into seats. And the closer the contest, the more votes wasted on the loser/s and the greater the disproportionality. In the 1983 British general election for example, 42 per cent of the votes gave the Conservatives more than 60 per cent of the seats and 25 per cent gave the Liberal alliance only three per cent of the seats. It is clear that one cannot have the closest proportion of seats to votes and still have geographical representation. Hence subject only as below, these two resolutions of the CRC were basically incompatible. Indeed in the world of electoral systems, the archetypal and still most popular geographical representation system, First Past the Post (FPTP) and Proportional Representation (PR) have historically been regarded as polar opposites. Relatively recently, however, some countries have combined both FPTP and PR in a sophisticated mix of both called the Mixed Member/Proportional system (MMP). In effect they run the two kinds of elections simultaneously, each voter having two votes, one for one candidate in a constituency just as we did before 1964 (FPTP) and the other for a party list as we have done 1964 onward (PR). When both results are known, adjustments are made to the FPTP results to make it proportional. If a party gets less constituency seats than their national proportion in the PR result, they are awarded enough seats to compensate from the party list. On the other hand, if they get more than their proportion, those seats must either be taken away (any volunteers please?) or as preferred, the size of the Parliament is increased. Increasing the size of Parliament alters the value of seats in terms of a parliamentary vote and therefore the balance of power between the political parties. Small parties/independent candidates grossly complicate this system such that a fairly high threshold (i.e., the minimum percentage of votes required before a party can share in the distribution of seats) of five per cent has been set in the three main countries using the MMP system to deter smaller parties/independents. Apart from the undesirability of excluding Rupert Roopnaraine and Manzoor Nadir, such disregard of five per cent of the votes again distorts the proportionality between seats and votes; back to square to one. The MMP system was engineered in Germany who some say are the best engineers in the world and whose party politics for historical reasons are markedly accommodating and consensual. The Guyanese context, with our history of rigged elections, ethnic political cleavage and the current self-righteous quixotics of some tilting uselessly at electoral system windmills among others, demands the simplest and fairest system for translation of votes into seats as we have now. Quite simply, in our context, the adjustments that MMP involves constitute grave dangers to our fledgling democracy. Based on the potential in our current Constitution to have one half of the 53 seats elected under FPTP (which will of course destroy the proportionality of that half), the CRC voted for the element of geographical representation without in my view grasping the full implications.
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