Begging the bigger parties to change an unfair electoral system has got third parties in Malta and the United Kingdom nowhere. But change may happen in the UK if voters choose to ‘hang’ parliament by voting en masse for the Liberal Democrats tomorrow
James Debono In 2005, Britain’s Labour Party won 35.2% of the total vote cast, but got 55.1% of the seats in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats won 23% of the vote but only 10% of the seats. This sounds grossly unfair, even more so in a country obsessed with fair play in sports.
But this did not prevent the British from accepting the legitimacy of “perverse” results in 1951 and 1974 when the party winning the most votes ended up with the fewest seats.
Nor was the system shaken in 1983, when the “alliance” between liberals and social democrats won a staggering 25% of the popular vote, but only 4% of seats – thus allowing Margaret Thatcher to change the social fabric of Britain with just 42% of votes.
As long as the system delivered a parliamentary majority, there was no serious attempt to address its shortcomings.
The closest Britain got to electoral reform was a commission appointed by newly elected Tony Blair after his 1997 landslide.
The commission was chaired by Lord Roy Jenkins – a liberal democrat with a heroic Labour past – who proposed a more representative system. But his recommendations fell on deaf ears as Labour proceeded to reap the benefits of the system in the next two consecutive elections.
In 2005, when taking account of the low turnout (61%), only one in five of the registered electorate actually voted for a Labour government – which was nonetheless assured 55% of the seats in the House of Commons.
It is only the prospect of a “hung” parliament, where no party would be able to govern without the support of the Liberal Democrats, that has raised the prospect of electoral change: a prospect that will once again disappear from the agenda, if David Cameron manages to get elected by a handful of seats.
As Nick Clegg has pointed out, British voters have a “once in a generation” chance to change an unfair system.
Maltese parallels
As in the UK, the two main Maltese parties have never shown much enthusiasm for electoral reform.
They have only shown an interest in patchwork reforms undertaken to prevent a repetition of the “perverse” 1981 result by ensuring that any party with more than 50% of first preferences gets a majority of seats.
Surely the outrage against the 1981 result contrasts with an acceptance of similar results in Britain; but this could be more a result of a greater distrust in the electoral processes due to the likelier prospect of gerrymandering in Malta, which lacks the British tradition of respect for the rules.
Subsequently when faced with the prospect of no party getting a majority of 50% plus one due the rise of Alternattiva Demokratika in the early 1990s, the two parties in parliament simply continued patching the system to ensure a majority of seats for the party with a relative majority of number one votes.
In so doing they also deprived third party voters from an effective use of second preferences to determine which party is the “lesser evil”.
Finally the system was amended on the eve of the last general election to ensure strict proportionality between votes and seat between the two parties elected to parliament.
Despite the patchwork approach, the prospect remains that a party might still be excluded from parliament even if it manages a 15% result on a national level, without surpassing the 16% district quota in any of the 13 districts.
And the Maltese system may well give a majority of seats to a party which lacks a majority in the country – as happened in the last general election, when the PN only managed to get 49.3% of the vote.
The current system may well produce unpopular minority governments enjoying the support of less than 45% of the vote.
And while an extra 1,500 votes over Labour were translated into four extra seats to give the PN its parliamentary majority, AD’s 3,800 votes were not enough to get a single seat.
Still, despite our system being as “potty” as Britain’s, AD has never achieved a critical mass of the kind obtained by the Liberal Democrats to substantiate its arguments for fairness.
Getting one MP out the five elected from one of the 13 district remains the only way to get elected in the Maltese part. Similarly,
the only way in Britain remains that of winning a majority in a single constituency.
One may well argue that until that happens Malta will remain stuck with its electoral system which has become more “potty” than ever thanks to the piecemeal tinkering carried in the past two decades.
A system whose mechanics are intended to produce a result based on the last count has been changed in to one which determines a result based on the first counts of the two parties represented in parliament.
The pros and cons of STV Ironically, Malta’s single transferable system was introduced by the British colonial administration as an attempt to encourage political fragmentation to avoid the emergence of strong national movements.
While it worked in the same way as the British intended in Ireland, in Malta it has acted as a stumbling block for third parties who have not been elected since 1966 – even if third parties managed to enjoy two spells of success between 1948 and 1955 and between 1962 and 1966.
Ironically, despite often being blamed for forestalling the growth of Maltese third parties, STV is the favoured option of the Liberal Democrats in the UK.
With 25% of the vote secured, the Lib Dems already feel safe enough to secure representation from any five-seat constituency.
Obviously, even in the UK STV would not represent a breakthrough for parties which – although smaller than the Lib Dems – are big enough to be win representation in the European Parliament,where the rules of strict proportionality between votes and seats applies.
This is even more the case in Malta, which lags behind Britain itself when it comes to third party representation despite its use of what experts regard as a theoretically more representative system.
One reason for this is Malta’s small size and relatively homogenous population. Apart from a stronger working class vote in the south and a more middle class vote in the northern districts, one finds little social differences which would help third parties with a more local or regional flavour.
In contrast, third parties in the UK have availed themselves of the different demographics in each of the 646 different constituencies.
It is not only regional parties like Welsh and Scottish nationalists which exploit these regional differences.
Last time round, George Gollaway managed to win a seat for the anti war party Respect, by contesting a seat with a large Muslim population.
This time round, Brighton Pavillion – once a Tory-leaning affluent seaside town which over the past years has attracted a more bohemian population of young graduates – is being tipped to elect the Britain’s first Green MP.
And despite losing the ‘major party’ label after the second world war, the Lib Dems have retained some of their strongholds in the rural south east where the ancient Whig-Tory dichotomy survived.
By holding to this base in the difficult postwar years, the liberals were able to emerge as moderate progressive force in 1980s when they teamed up with breakaway social democrats, who no longer felt at home in an unelectable Labour party which was drifting towards the ‘loony left’.
Paradoxically, in the past decade the Liberal Democrats have challenged New Labour’s drift to the right, by opposing the war in Iraq and presenting themselves as advocates of fiscal fairness.
The Maltese anomaly Moreover the use of STV in Ireland has not only resulted in five parties being represented in parliament but has even produced coalitions like that between Greens and conservatives, currently in office.
Apart from the fact that constituencies in Ireland tend to be bigger and are given more seats, thus increasing the chances of third parties winning a seat, Irish voters also tend to make greater use of the vote transferability system through which they can give preferences to different parties.
Ironically constitutional amendments giving the party with the highest number of votes the greatest number of seats has deformed the use of STV in Malta.
While previously people opting for a small party could put their mind at rest by giving their second preference to the “lesser evil” among the big parties, this choice has been undermined by a system which hands over the government to the party with the highest number of first count votes.
Ultimately, while the adoption STV in the UK may well strengthen an established third party like the Lib Dems – possibly to the exclusion of ‘new kids on the block’ who will still face a high district threshold – the only system which could galvanize third party voting in Malta would be one based on a national quota which prevails in most of continental Europe.
But nobody can expect any of the established Maltese parties to hand such a precious gift to AD or other third parties on a silver platter.
The British system explained Britain is divided in 646 constituencies, each electing a single MP.
Voters are simply expected to mark an ‘X’ next to the name of the candidate representing the party of their choice.
Since only one MP is elected in each constituency, all the voters who did not vote for him or her are not represented in parliament.
Their votes do not help elect anybody and so are wasted. They could have stayed at home and the result would not have been altered.
In 2005, 19 million voters throughout Great Britain cast ineffective votes - that is, 70% of those who voted. Voters are also represented unequally. In 2005, the average number of votes per MP elected was: 26,906 for Labour, 44,373 for Conservative and 96,539 for Liberal Democrats.
Probably if such a system was used in Malta localities like Sliema would always elect a Nationalist MP while Cospicua would always elect a Labour MP. The election outcome would depend on the outcome of a few towns with uncertain loyalties like say Mellieha, Qormi or Rabat.
While the Conservatives are staunch defenders of this system, arguing that it has given the UK stable governments in all but one election since the second world war, the Liberals are proposing something akin Malta’s and Irelands’ single transferable vote system.
In this way each STV constituency would elect between 3 and 5 MPs, depending on its size. As in Malta voters, will rank the candidates in numerical order, putting a ‘1’ for their favourite, a ‘2’ for the next, and so on. If the voter’s first choice candidate does not need their vote, either because he or she is elected without it, or because he or she has too few votes to be elected, then the vote is transferred to the voter’s second choice candidate, and so on.
In this way, most of the votes help to elect a candidate and far fewer votes are wasted.
On its part, Labour is more inclined to accept a less radical reform known as “the alternative vote” system, by retaining the same constituency boundaries and the election of a single MP from each.
However, rather than marking an ‘X’ against their preferred candidate, each voter would rank their candidates in an order of preference, putting ‘1’ next to their favourite, a ‘2’ by their second choice and so on. If a candidate receives a majority of first place votes, he or she would be elected just as under the present system. However, if no single candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the second choices for the candidate at the bottom are redistributed.
This system would ensure that no votes are wasted but would have little impact on the representation of their party candidates.
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