Our electoral system (when not abused) is widely acknowledged to be fair, but it is also nerve-wrackingly slow. HARRY VASSALLO explains the niceties of our Proportional Representation by Single Transferable Vote system
Most times of the year learning about how our electoral system works is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Come election time some people get curious. Unfortunately it is just the time that all sorts of myths and slander get bandied about. This time around there some people voted for the first time and several others voted for the first time only in Malta. They then spent four days in bewilderment wondering how their preferences were to be distributed in the course of a painstakingly complex counting system.
Letting them have some idea about how the system works – and how it is used and abused – may be useful. There may be not a few veterans of several elections who may find it useful also.
PRSTV Proportional Representation by Single Transferable Vote (PRSTV) is a highly sophisticated system intended to give as full an expression of voter preferences as possible. We do not vote for a political party, nor for a single candidate. We get to set them all out by order of preference.
No matter how complex the system may begin to seem as we explore the secrets of vote transfer, the key element to be kept in mind that is that we have just one vote: when our first choice fails, it gets transferred to our next choice. We do not have several votes.
The quota Candidates are elected when the number of votes they have collected reaches a predetermined quota. This is established by dividing the number of votes cast by the number of available seats plus one. In Saturday’s election five seats are available and the quota will be arrived at by dividing the number of votes cast by six. In percentage terms the quota is thus 16.6% of the votes cast.
At the end of this first count it is clear which party has the most votes and in general elections, when a clear lead is established, the victors begin to celebrate while there may be no candidates elected.
If a candidate or more has exceeded the quota, they are elected and their votes are recounted in order to determine how the surplus of votes above the quota is to redistributed.
This time the elected candidate’s votes are placed according to the second preference expressed into the pigeonholes of the other candidates. A will have 300 votes, C will have 250 and so on, but they do not have all these votes credited to them.
So a calculation is made to establish the proportion of the surplus to the quota, plus surplus votes cast in favour of the elected candidate. If the surplus is one sixth, each of the other candidates will be credited with one-sixth of the second preference votes expressed in his or her favour. Thus Candidate A will gain just 50 of the 300 votes in his pigeonhole. The quota of votes of the elected candidates is then bundled up and passes out of the election process.
The election then passes to round two in which another candidate may reach the quota and be elected. Here the process we have just described is repeated. If no candidate is elected the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated, and his or votes are redistributed according to the second preferences expressed by the voters. In this case there is no proportional assignment because all the votes of the eliminated candidate are redistributed. If candidate A gains 300 votes, this time he will keep the full 300 votes.
It is a truly tedious process but scrupulous in expressing the will of the voter in a fully articulated manner. Most people just vote red or blue and have done with it, a bit like taking a pig to market in a Ferrari. They never suspect that the system works best when people vote for all the candidates.
Block voting In fact the system expects voters not to vote for all the candidates and this is why a virtual seat is counted in establishing the quota. So many votes stop half way, hardly any candidate would have a full quota otherwise.
Political parties usually encourage their supporters to vote for all their candidates in order to secure as many vote transfers as possible, but that is only half the story.
The party leaders also have to counter any block voting: by encouraging their partisans to vote only for a select few candidates, a group of candidates can team up to secure votes for themselves while starving the competition of second and later preferences. While parties actively encourage block voting to the prejudice of rival parties, they also face the menace of internal block voting.
In devising such systems the parties have effectively warped the original design and few voters now imagine that they can and should vote for candidates in parties other than their own. On the perfectly safe assumption that one’s party will not be the only one to elect some of its candidates, it seems wise to stick one’s oar in to ensure that of the rival party’s candidates, X and not Y will make it to power.
After one has voted for all the candidates fielded by one’s party it makes sense to give a leg up to the candidates in the rival party one considers least harmful.
With the advent of a greater number of parties on the Maltese political scene a further technique comes into play. In the 2004 EP elections Green candidate Arnold Cassola survived the counts until the last PN candidate, Joanna Drake, was eliminated.
A significant number of votes were then transferred from the PN to Cassola but the bulk of the PN votes had no further preferences expressed beyond Joanna Drake. In the resulting contest Louis Grech (MLP) outdid Cassola and the MLP gained three MEP seats to the PN’s two. In that election it would have made sense to most PN voters to allow the Greens to benefit from any ultimate surplus votes in order not to give any advantage to Labour.
Unbeknownst to most voters, this fatal pattern has been played out in various local elections sometimes to the disadvantage of Labour, sometimes to that of the PN. Party block voting remains deeply entrenched in voters’ psyche because of the years of propaganda encouraging it in a two party political context. Now that the scenario has changed we continue to see thousands upon thousands of votes “wasted” by the major parties which remain unable to kick their “bad habit”.
Voting secrecy The vote is only relatively secret in Malta. The major parties don’t complain, voters don’t know and the EU will not take an interest in this glaring fault since otherwise it would have to scrutinize all other voting systems just as thoroughly.
On the back of each ballot paper the parties and the electoral commission place their rubberstamps ostensibly to prevent election fraud by the insertion of counterfeit ballot papers. In fact the PN and the PL change their rubberstamps for every ballot box. In this way they can make out the trend of votes not only in every electoral district but also within a small number of streets. Since their local clubs appoint street leaders to assess the situation for them door by door, they are able to make a shrewd guess as to why there was a shift of 20 votes between one election and another in a given number of streets.
To add to the infamy of the system a list of names of those who did no collect their voting documents is published and the parties also collect the list of names of those who did collect the voting document and did not vote.
In the course of an election a running tally is kept and voters who did not collect their documents are pestered to do so by telephone. On the day those who choose to turn up late are pestered by phone because they have not yet voted.
Disillusioned partisans who want to hide their disillusionment for fear of retribution often pretend to cast their vote but leave it blank or invalidate by writing their complaint across it. On the other hand those who are thoroughly upset and are aware of the Big Brother scrutiny make it a point not to collect their voting document or not to vote, deliberately making sure that their names are seen by the party hacks who scan the lists of names.
Parties cheat and lie, voters use the system for their own ends, internecine strife among candidates is worse than across party lines: nothing is ever what is seems.
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This time around there some people voted for the first time and several others voted for the first time only in Malta. They then spent four days in bewilderment wondering how their preferences were to be distributed in the course of a painstakingly complex counting system. 
