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9 maltatoday, WEDNESDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2016 Editorial Our electoral system has broken down MaltaToday, MediaToday Co. Ltd, Vjal ir-Rihan, San Gwann SGN 9016 MANAGING EDITOR: SAVIOUR BALZAN ACTING EDITOR: JURGEN BALZAN Tel: (356) 21 382741-3, 21 382745-6 • Fax: (356) 21 385075 Website: www.maltatoday.com.mt E-mail: newsroom@mediatoday.com.mt There is a limit to how often (and to what extent) one can tinker with a machine that just doesn't work. Certain mechani- cal issues can be kept going for a while by means of minor alterations here and there; but sooner or later, a point will come when it is more cost ef- fective and practical to simply replace the defective mecha- nism altogether. This applies to political sys- tems as much as to mechanical devices. The ruling delivered by the Constitutional Court last week – ostensibly to rectif y a mistake in the counting process during the 2013 election – has firmly illustrated that Malta's malfunctioning electoral sys- tem is at a point of no return. Not so much because of the mistake itself – a matter of 50 votes placed in the wrong pigeonhole – but because the fault proved impossible to rem- edy without radically altering the composition of parliament: to the extent of authorising more seats than are accounted for by the parliamentary repre- sentation system. It is admittedly a complex problem, but it can be simpli- fied as follows. A batch of 50 votes belonging to PN can- didate Claudette Buttigieg was mistakenly placed in the pigeonhole of PN candidate Michael Asciak, who contested the same [eighth] district. Given that the vote difference between Labour's Edward Sci- cluna and Buttigieg was of just eight votes on the first count, it was argued that Buttigieg should have been elected in- stead of Scicluna. The subsequent voter inherit- ance would also have panned out differently. According to the Court's calculations, "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." Herein lies the problem. While the Constitutional Court can order the Electoral Commission to issue more parliamentary seats... it cannot revoke any seat that has already been given. So even though Labour gained a seat more than it should have (always accord- ing to the Court's ruling), the Court could not restore the balance by stripping the Labour government of the wrongly- allotted seat. Moreover, the rules decree that the total number of par- liamentary seats must be odd; so the situation could not be rectified by giving the PN one seat to make up the 27 it should have won. The Court's response to this dilemma was to allow Labour to retain its seat, and giving the PN an extra two seats to com- pensate, while also respecting the numerical regulations. As a result, the number of parlia- mentary seats has risen from 69 to 71. This evokes an earlier problem with the same, severely f lawed electoral system. The original 69 seats already represented an increase over the distribu- tion of seats as determined by the counting system. Without taking the mistake into con- sideration, the Constitutional mechanism had already been deployed to grant the Nation- alist opposition an extra four seats, so as to ensure propor- tionality with the party's share of the national vote. This is be- cause our complicated district system does not always produce a perfect tally between votes cast, and the percentage of seats won in the House. In 1981, a similar scenario re- sulted in Dom Mintoff 's Labour party winning a majority of seats but not of votes, caus - ing much political tension and unrest. This unrest ultimately led to a negotiated settlement that was clearly intended only to prevent a repeat of that elec- toral result in 1987. The Constitutional amend- ment served its immediate purpose, but the mechanism remains highly unsatisfactory. Rather than fix the problem at its source – i.e., revising the division of Malta into districts, the quota system and the meth- od used to elect candidates – we retained the machinery with all its f laws, and created a Constitutional proviso which is only applicable in an exact repeat of the 1981 situation: i.e. when only two parties are represented in parliament. This is unacceptable for two reasons. One, a situation could very easily arise where neither party achieves an absolute majority. If that happens – as it nearly did in 2008 – the mechanism will prove useless, and we would be back where we began in 1981. Secondly, the agreed Constitutional mecha- nism can be seen to serve a purely partisan purpose. Time and again it has been used as a deterrent to warn against third- party representation, because it would expose an electoral f law we never really fixed. This is the equivalent of keep- ing a car together with bits of string, as opposed to fixing it or buying a new one. Not only is the engine f lawed, but by tinkering with it we have cre- ated additional malfunctions without solving the original problem. Moreover, the Court ruling also exposes another ingrained systemic f law. Ultimately, a mistake of 50 votes translated into two extra seats for the PN... when as many as 5,000 first count votes cast for a third party such as AD, has never translated into a single seat. If the idea of amending the Constitution was to make the seat-count ref lect the elector- ate's express wishes, it has clearly failed. As a result, we have seriously distorted the political playing field. Malta cannot afford to go to another election, without fix- ing its f lawed electoral system once and for all.