News | Sunday, 18 January 2009

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ABELA’S SKELETON

As a leading Labour Party representative on the 1987 electoral commission he defended the gerrymandered districts that gave Labour the 1981 and 1987 perverse electoral results

Matthew Vella
Malta’s next President, George Abela, was one of five Labour representatives on the infamous 1987 electoral commission, who shot down a minority report to revise the gerrymandered electoral boundaries.
The decision left Malta’s electoral boundaries unchanged in the 1987 election, resulting in Labour once again winning a majority of seats but a minority of votes, as had happened exactly in the 1981 election.
It was only a previous Constitutional amendment in 1987 that allowed the Nationalists to govern with the majority of votes.
George Abela, Lawrence Gonzi’s personal choice for President, represented Labour’s interests on the 1987 commission together with Emanuel Bonello, Massimo Fenech, Joseph Caruana, and Carmel L. Farrugia.
Together they shot down the minority report presented by the Nationalist members on the commission – Maurice Zarb Adami, Robert Spiteri Staines and Italo Raniolo – to revise the gerrymandered electoral boundaries.
The minority report accused the commission, with its majority of Labour representatives, of not having revised the gerrymandered districts that had led to the perverse 1981 electoral result.
The minority report said the districts were not geographically close to each other, and that district populations were disproportionately higher or lower than the electoral quota.
It was these gerrymandered boundaries that allowed Labour to win the 1981 election with a minority of votes, because the districts had guaranteed the party a majority of seats – back then the Constitutional requisite to be elected to power.
But the delegates appointed by the Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici government, including George Abela, resisted the attempt to reform the gerrymandered boundaries, ignoring the minority report.
It was only the eleventh-hour amendment to the Constitution (Act IV of 1987) that allowed the Nationalists to be elected to power with an absolute majority of votes. But Labour still managed to gain a majority of seats.
Without the Constitutional amendment, pushed by former MLP leader Dom Mintoff in the aftermath of heightened bloodshed and political violence, the Nationalists would effectively have still been in opposition in 1987.
Asked for his reasons why he and the Labour delegates had shot down the minority report, Abela said he did not remember.
“I remember that a lawsuit had been filed in court over the electoral boundaries, and that the Court accepted the claims of the electoral commission,” he said, referring to a court case filed by the Partit Demokratiku Malti right before the May 1987 election against the electoral commission on the electoral boundaries.
The PDM claimed the final report approved by the electoral commission and presented to parliament had been “deliberately chosen… in bad faith”, having ignored the minority report, and that it “did not observe the Constitutional requisites”.
But Judge Wallace Gulia ruled that the Court had no jurisdiction on the matter, since the commission was Constitutionally appointed and could not be scrutinised by a court. Gulia disposed of the case.
“The boundaries had not been gerrymandered,” Abela told MaltaToday. “In 1987 we introduced big changes to the electoral process to ensure a more effective control by political parties and more transparency.”
Abela added that after 1987, he was again nominated to sit on the next electoral commission.
The gerrymandering of Malta’s electoral boundaries led to political tensions between Labour and the Nationalists which heightened the confrontation of the early 1980s.
The 1987 Constitutional amendment was intended to counteract gerrymandering by awarding government to the party that wins a majority of votes, and not the majority of parliamentary seats, which can be manipulated by the gerrymandering of districts.

Gerrymandering, the PDM case and the Constitutional amendment

In previous elections, gerrymandering enabled the ruling Labour party to ensure it could manipulate the number of seats it wins in each district. This would be made by changing electoral boundaries to include more Labour voters.
The Maltese electoral system divides the island into 13, five-member districts. In the December 1981 elections, Labour won 34 seats with 49.1% of the popular vote, while the PN received only 31 seats even if it obtained 50.9% of the total vote.
The infamous “perverse” result led to the Nationalists boycotting parliament.

The PDM case
In September 1986, the electoral commission published its first report on the changes to the electoral boundaries, which was presented to parliament.
A minority report authored by the PN members on the commission, claimed the boundaries had not been revised to avoid another perverse result as had happened in 1981.
They said that the districts were still not geographically close, and that district populations were not “as practicably close to the electoral quota” as required by the Constitution.
When parliament referred the report back to the commission a month later, the same commission published its final report in October 1986, ignoring the minority report.
Then in 1987, the two leading members of the small Partit Demokratiku (PDM) – Lino Briguglio and Michael Vella – filed a writ against the electoral commission, alleging its final report was not according to the Constitutional provisions on electoral boundaries, and asking the Court to order the necessary changes to the boundaries take place.
But the Court declared it had no jurisdiction on the Constitutionally-appointed commission, unless there was a clear breach of the law. It said it was not its competence to compare the two reports, and that it could not accept any witnesses (in this case, the authors of the minority report) without any proof that the commission had acted “in bad faith” as alleged by the PDM.

The Constitutional amendment
Prior to the May 1987 election, the Constitution was amended to ensure the party with more than 50% of the popular vote would have a majority of seats in parliament, and form the government.
The Labour government proposed this amendment in exchange for Nationalist support of two other amendments to the constitution, stipulating Malta’s neutrality status and policy of nonalignment, and the prohibition of foreign interference in Malta’s elections.
The amendment gave an automatic parliamentary majority to the party getting more than 50% of the popular vote, toppling Labour from power for the first time since 1971.
Although the Nationalists gained only 31 seats (to Labour’s 34) despite obtaining a bare majority vote, they were awarded four ‘bonus’ seats under the amendment to raise their total to 35.

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