‘Every vote counts’, my foot

You can generally tell something is rotten in the state of your country’s democracy, when Parliamentary seats are no longer won fairly and squarely in elections... but simply dished out by the law courts instead. 

Not that we really needed another reminder... but still, there you have it. In an ordinary parliamentary representation system, an ‘MP’ would be occupying a seat in order to represent constituents. The seat itself would be made available on the basis of how many votes are cast in a particular constituency. It’s not a terribly difficult concept to grasp.

It is, however, a terribly dangerous principle to go messing around with. Take away those two precepts, and your Parliamentary seat suddenly becomes meaningless. For starters, the number of seats itself is calculated as a proportion of the electorate. In our case, the country is divided into 13 districts (which is in itself ridiculous, but I’ll deal with that another time), and each district elects a number of seats using the single transferable vote system. It might not be the most user-friendly system in the world, I’ll grant you. But for all its unnecessary complexity, on paper it respects the basic tenets of democracy.

Or at least it did, until we started butchering it for purely partisan purposes. As things stood before this week’s court ruling – which simply invented two magical seats out of nothing – we had already tweaked the machinery to override the democratic process in certain circumstances. In 1987, the Constitution was amended to avoid a repeat of the 1981 election result... which Labour won in terms of seats, despite losing the actual vote-count. 

As tends to be the case in such matters, the brokers of that arrangement (both cited as the most far-sighted of their respective parties) failed spectacularly to foresee a situation whereby neither of the two parties actually gets 50% + 1 of the total vote. This happened in 2008, with the result that – thanks to a patently flawed Constitutional mechanism that we are now more or less lumped with – additional seats were pulled out of a hat, to provide the PN with the parliamentary majority it needed to form a government. 

Never mind that the PN went on to lose even those bogus, phantom seats in just a couple of years...  the fact remains that its one-seat majority was concocted to begin with. What should have been a temporary, short-stop solution to an endemic problem, ended up becoming the new system. Why? Because as long as the two parties are happy... who the heck cares about anyone else?

In the end, the PN won the popular vote by a mere 1,500 votes... and was awarded four (4) extra seats. Alternattiva Demokratika got almost 4,000 votes in the same election... and ended up without any seats at all. So any talk that the extra seats were intended to accurately reflect the electorate’s wishes – which was the justification for the Constitutional amendment in the first place – clearly goes out of the window. Those seats were allocated just to preserve a parliamentary duopoly for the sole benefit of the two parties themselves. And this should not surprise us, because it was only the two parties which negotiated the shambolic 1987 amendment. And they never think about anyone but themselves.

Now, we’ve just taken that same skewed logic several hundred steps further. The Constitutional Court has just ruled that yet another two additional seats are to be invented for the benefit of a party that didn’t actually make the necessary district quota to win them. Those additional seats do not fit anywhere at all in the district system described above. They do not represent any segment of the electorate... and, most bizarrely of all, they do not even compute with the same court’s calculations. 

Here is an excerpt from our report on Friday: “A batch of 50 first preference votes belonging to [Claudette] Buttigieg were mistakenly placed in the pigeonhole of PN candidate Michael Asciak, also a contender on the eighth district. Given that the vote difference between [Edward] Scicluna, today finance minister, and Buttigieg on the first count was of just eight votes, it was argued that Buttigieg should have been elected instead of Scicluna.”

This is the important part: “According to the court, this also meant that Labour should have elected a total of 38 seats while the PN should have elected 27, as opposed to the 39 seats and 26 seats respectively.”

Everyone clear on this? The Constitutional Court decreed that the actual result of the election should have been 38 for Labour, and 27 for PN. There is very little room for ambiguity in that conclusion.   

So what happened next? Did the court deliver a verdict based on its own reasoning? No, of course not. That would be the logical thing to do, but we’re obviously not in the realm of logic here. Instead, the Constitutional Court created an entirely new configuration that does not reflect the votes cast, nor even its own calculations. It awarded 39 seats to Labour, and... wait for it... 32 to the PN.

Fascinating, I must say. How did 27 seats suddenly become 32? On the basis of 50 misplaced votes, which do not even account for a fraction of the quota necessary to elect a single seat? And if, in the court’s opinion, Labour had an extra seat all along... why wasn’t it removed? Why, in brief, did the court ruling not allocate 38 seats to Labour, and 27 to the PN, based on its own assessment of the election result? 

To be honest, I’m not even interested in the reply. I don’t care what obscure branch of mathematics was used to concoct such a blatant perversion of an electoral result. Under the circumstances, I fail to see why I should even care about the electoral system at all.

Why bother even voting... when your vote can just be chopped and changed at will, almost four years after it was cast? The new Parliamentary configuration is not the one we actually voted for in 2013, not by a long shot. And this implies that the electorate’s actual voting intentions are now irrelevant to the actual outcome. If seats can be dished out by a higher authority, on the basis of a logic that doesn’t even make sense within its own parameters... what point is there in participating in the democratic process at all?

I for one will not vote in general elections, until the electoral system is revised to reflect the actual vote. And this does not mean simply an end to absurd and insulting decisions like the above. Even without mistakes made in the counting process, our system is such that literally thousands of votes – all cast in good faith – are not even counted in the final result. When candidates are eliminated, their subsequent counts are not inherited by other candidates down the pecking order. They’re just left sitting there in their pigeonholes, automatically disenfranchising thousands of bona fide voters.

Perhaps the most anti-democratic way our system has been perverted over the years is that it now makes third-party representation all but impossible. Under the current rules, you can get 5% of the national vote – anywhere up to 10%, in fact – and still remain without a seat in parliament. As many as 20,000 first count votes, spread across the entire country, would be worth nothing all... while 50 measly little votes cast for the PN are suddenly (and inexplicably) worth two seats. 

And the inbuilt injustice is by no means limited to this PL-PN parliamentary firewall. Even with all these unfair hurdles in place... we nonetheless have a situation where three parties (four, if you include Giovanna Debono as an independent MP) are now represented in parliament. Marlene Farrugia is an MP, and also the leader of the Partit Demokratiku. She did not win her seat in that capacity, true... but she is still sitting in it, and (unlike the two new PN MPs) she can claim to actually represent constituents. 

But when it came to the allocation of parliamentary funds, she was still left out of the loop. Labour got its share of the booty, in accordance with its seats in parliament. Same for the PN. But the leader of another party, occupying another seat in the same parliament? Forget it. The Labour-appointed Speaker of the House overlooked her existence altogether... and with it, the existence of all the people who gave her their number one vote.

In so doing, a parliamentary budget that is supposed to be allocated to ALL the democratically elected representatives of the people, got hijacked and is now being split only between the two larger parties: the same two parties that had already butchered the system to prevent third party representation, and now intends to continue ruling the roost, even when a third party is indeed represented in parliament. 

And the next thing you know, they’ll be telling us how important it is to vote in the next election. ‘Every vote counts’ they say. Except, of course, all the votes not cast for either Labour or the PN. Those don’t count for toffee. And another thing, they’ll be telling us that, by not voting, we will be ‘allowing other people to take the decision for us.’

Oh? And isn’t that exactly what’s happening right now? We vote one way in an election... only for the law courts (or the Constitution) to decide another?

In any case: don’t bother knocking on my door come election time. Not before you reform this rotten system into something that actually resembles a functional parliamentary democracy.