'Now is the time for electoral reform,' electoral expert says

Malta’s electoral system, and by extension, its democracy, could be strengthened if the electoral system were to be replaced with one which was less conducive to clientelism, according to newly-elected Opposition MP Hermann Schiavone.   

Malta’s parliament is elected through the Single Transferable Vote system which requires voters to fill in a ballot paper containing a list of all the candidates running on a particular district by writing the number ‘one’ next to the name of their preferred candidate, and continuing in numerical order according to their subsequent preferences. The system was adopted in 1921 with changes being made at various points along the way. 

“The truth is that the two parties have always discussed reforms to fix problems related to governability and proportionality,” said Schiavone, an expert on Malta’s electoral system. 

“The way in which it affects candidates has never been discussed. Nobody has ever taken the initiative to talk about how the system affects candidates.” 

On Tuesday, Schiavone used the parliamentary adjournment time to discuss some of the system’s aspects which, he said, were unfair on candidates and needed reform, and in comments to MaltaToday insisted that the moment was right for such a discussion. 

“This is the right moment to talk about electoral reform, and not on the eve of an election,” he said.

While this legislature is his first, Schiavone has been politically active for many years and is known to be an expert on Malta’s STV system, which is the subject of his doctoral thesis. 

One of the problems with the system is the fact that candidates vying for a parliamentary seat must compete with candidates from the same party, rather than candidates from rival parties. 

According to Schiavone this results in candidates being forced to resort to giveaways, rather than policy, to differentiate themselves from other candidates.

“We have a very big problem with clientelism and we must find a way of reining it in by discussing different systems where candidates are not so heavily influenced by voters,” he said.

Removing the surname factor

A well-known characteristic of the STV in Maltese politics is what is commonly known as the donkey-vote, where voters intending to vote for all the candidates of a particular party give their number one vote to the candidate at the top of the list before continuing with the remaining candidates from top to bottom. 

With candidates listed alphabetically on the ballot sheet, this leads candidates whose surname begins with the letter ‘A’ being favoured over those whose surname begins with letters occurring later in the alphabet. 

One way to address this, said Schiavone, is the Robson’s Rotation system. 

Newly elected Nationalist MP Hermann Schiavone

“Say you have 500 registered voters in a district, and five candidates representing each party,” he explained. “The system would see 100 ballot papers printed with one candidate first on the list, while the next 100 would have another candidate’s name on top and so on.”

This way, he said, all candidates would have an equal chance of winning votes on the basis of them being at the top of the list. 

While the implementation of such a measure would be relatively easy, Schiavone suggested there might be considerable resistance to it among MPs. 

“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas,” he said. “Have a look at how many MPs are in parliament because of their surname.”

Casual elections: the better you do, the lower your chances

Schiavone also spoke about casual elections being unfair on candidates. 

“One of the ideas behind an electoral system is that the more votes you obtain, the greater the chance of being elected,” he said. “In the case of casual elections, this does not apply, because if you do well and aren’t elected you are at a disadvantage in the casual election.”

In each round of voting under the STV system, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their votes distributed among the remaining candidates according to the order of preference on the eliminated candidate’s vote. 

Once all the available seats have been filled, candidates elected on two districts must choose one of their two seats to relinquish, which would then be opened up to a casual election between unelected candidates who contested the district. 

In a casual election, the box containing the votes won by the candidate vacating the seat are distributed among those contesting, according to the second preference on the vote.

Schiavone explained that votes donated from an eliminated candidate to a second candidate get transferred back to the former if they were to contest a casual election for the latter’s seat, and are added to their tally of second preference votes from the eliminated candidate.  

This means that, whereas candidates who were not eliminated start from a zero-vote tally, those who were eliminated, and who therefore have donated some of their votes to an elected candidate, are given them back. 

The anomaly, said Schiavone, could be easily addressed by the country deciding not to allow candidates to contest more than one district. 

He acknowledged that districts might change and a candidate’s constituency could be divided, leading them to be inclined to contest two districts. However, he said this could be remedied by keeping district boundaries the same for between 10 and 15 years. 

“Then, if a locality grows significantly, as has happened in St Paul’s Bay, we could increase the number of candidates elected from that district,” he suggested.

What a new system could look like

He described Malta’s system as a hybrid one, which was never intended as such. 

“The first count was not intended to determine governance. The number of seats in parliament was meant to determine who governed the country,” he explained, adding that the vote’s present dual purpose resulted from the result of the 1981 election. 

In that election, the Nationalist Party had won the popular vote, while the Labour Party won a majority of seats, resulting in a political crisis which led to the adoption of constitutional amendments.  

He said that Malta’s system should theoretically facilitate representation by smaller parties, but the vote’s dual purpose meant that “everyone understood the need for their first count vote to go to the party they want in government”. 

Schiavone has a passionate interest in the electoral system and has tried to come up with his own ideal system. 

“You would have two ballots – one where you vote for the party you want to govern, and a second sheet on which, irrespective of which party you’ve voted for, you can rank candidates according to your preference,” he said, adding that this would increase a candidate’s pool of potential voters. 

“In my case, it would increase the 7,700 PN voters in my district to the entire district because they know that the ‘one’ they give to me is not going to affect who governs the country.”

The new system would also preclude the Prime Minister and other members of the government’s executive branch from retaining a post in the executive for more than 10 years as a means of facilitating “new ideas”.

Finally, said Schiavone, another mechanism worth considering was that of electing candidates on the basis of party lists. 

“In Sweden, they have a parity between men and women because of party lists,” he said. “Candidates from a party would be elected on the basis of their position in a list of candidates so if my party elects 29 MPs and I am 30th on the list I would not make it.”

He explained that the country achieves this parity because the list alternates between men and women, meaning there would always be a roughly equal number elected to parliament. In addition to achieving better female representation, he said it would also favour the participation of technocrats who are not suited to a combative type of politics.