Harry, Nerik and the Single Transferable Vote

 

One of my habitual reads on Fridays is Harry Vassallo's column in The Times. I must say that I am generally impressed neither by his attempts to belittle those who do not share his views nor by his grip on reality. It was the latter that was most clearly absent from his column today.

Apart from the rather pointless stuff about what Nerik Mizzi might say about his successors if he were to come back from the dead, there is also some rather questionable arithmetic and a good dose of wishful thinking. According to Harry Vassallo, around 2000 votes in one district would be enough for the Greens, or anyone else, to elect a candidate to Parliament (plus some lower preference votes from friends and family). I know of no candidate in recent elections that was elected with anything close to 2000 final count votes, although the fifth candidate to be elected is generally elected with less than a full quota. Dr. Vassallo should have pointed out that, in order for the candidate to be elected, over a thousand additional votes would have to be siphoned off the other parties in subsequent counts, net of any losses in the other direction. In past elections, the opposite has tended to happen, as Alternattiva's electorate tends to be much less 'disciplined' than that of the mainstream parties.

Harry Vassallo blames the electoral system for his party's stunted growth. I think the primary blame lies with the party's own failure to focus its energies on attainable and useful objectives. And, incidentally, I doubt whether Vassallo would welcome the election to Parliament of candidates from the right-wing movements, which have a potential electorate at least as large as that of Alternattiva and would probably also make it to Parliament with a system based on pure proportional representation. For all their defects, the two main parties are nowadays at least moderate and democratic and present the electorate with alternative management teams for the country. A pure PR system might result in a situation where a significant change in the people's vote is reflected not in a change of government but in a tweaking of the ruling coalition. This is what happens in quite a number of European countries.

The electoral system agreed between the main parties avoids two other pitfalls. It is much less arbitrary than the first-past-the-post system, which can lead to situations such as that of the UK, where the Conservative Party currently has to outdistance Labour by about 10% of the popular vote in order to be sure of a parliamentary majority. It is also much more democratic than the continental PR system, which substitutes 'party lists' for our own single transferable vote, thus depriving the electorate of any real say in choosing the deputies themselves.

One of the assets of our system that have not been as yet fully exploited by the electorate is the possibility of expressing extremely nuanced and sophisticated preferences that might not be limited to one party. A rational voter, for example, would continue expressing preferences even after his own party's list is exhausted and even when all that remain are candidates of the 'opposing' party. For example, in some districts, it is quite possible for voters of one party to decide races between candidates of the other party in the last count, overturning the result in favour of more moderate or better qualified candidates. In 2003, there were three districts (4th, 5th and 7th) where Nationalist voters had this opportunity (and did not take it) and two districts (8th and 13th) where Labour voters could have chosen between the remaining Nationalist candidates, after having finished electing their own, and likewise did not do so.