Editorial | Discuss proportional voting, too

Neither Prime Minister Andrew Holness nor Marlene Malahoo Forte, the minister he recently gave the job to marshal his constitutional reform agenda, has yet set out the Government’s priorities on this front. Neither have they said, or signalled, how they intend to go about the process.

We have a good sense of only one of the reform issues that is likely to be near the top of the prime minister’s agenda, the question of removing the monarch of Great Britain, over which he recently jousted with one of his predecessors, P.J. Patterson, who said that it was one of the things on which the political parties agreed and should, therefore, be easy to get done.

Notwithstanding, this newspaper has in recent times offered several matters that ought to be part of any constitutional reform debate, including the idea of mandatory voting, as part of efforts to staunch Jamaica’s declining voter participation. As a corollary to the idea, Jamaica should add to the list new approaches for political parties to get seats in Parliament, so as to make the system fairer and more representative of voters’ intentions.

BARBADOS CLEAN SWEEP

Coincidentally, the day Ms Malahoo Forte was telling Parliament about what informed Prime Minister Holness’ decision to establish the Ministry of Legal and Constitutional Affairs, voters in Barbados, a regional partner, were casting ballots in a general election. As happened in 2018, Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s Barbados Labour Party made a clean sweep of Parliament’s 30 seats.

Ms Mottley is an intellectually impressive leader, who is at the height of her political powers. And her primary opposition, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), one of the Caribbean’s outstanding parties, is much diminished from the institution that led Barbados into independence.

Nonetheless, the raw seat count isn’t the entire story of the Barbados election. First, the voter turnout, at 42.8 per cent, down nearly 197 percentage points from 59.5 per cent in 2018 – a decline only partially explained by the fact that a significant number of voters couldn’t cast ballots because of COVID-19-related restrictions. Ms Mottley’s party, though, received a whopping 69 per cent of the ballots cast. But the DLP’s share of the vote wasn’t zero, or anywhere nearly as bad as that. It was 26.55 per cent, up nearly five percentage points from the previous election.

Barbados isn’t the only CARICOM member country where such parliamentary sweeps have happened in recent times, in consecutive elections. Keith Mitchell’s New National Party did the same in Grenada in 2013 and 2018. And harbours hopes of completing a hat-trick at the next vote. Significantly, in both elections, despite winning no seats, Grenada’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress, received nearly 41 per cent of the popular vote.

Jamaica hasn’t had such extreme outturns, but we have had instances where the parliamentary seats won by either of the two main parties, Mr Holness’ Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party (PNP), were disproportionately out of whack with the share of their votes. Even in the 2020 general election, when the voter turnout was a dismal 37.85 per cent and Mr Holness’ party received 56.37 per cent of the votes, it won 78 per cent of Parliament’s 63 seats.

What happened in Barbados and Grenada and, to a lesser extent, in our case, are the quirks of the first-past-the-post election system and the largely majoritarian democracy that it produces. The great argument for the maintenance of this electoral arrangement is that it produces stable governments. It isn’t good, though, at delivering equity in political representation.

Nothing has happened in either Grenada or Barbados, or in Jamaica when the PNP boycotted a general election in the 1980s, to suggest that their leaders were keen to deliberately undermine democracy. Nonetheless, there is the danger of institutional atrophy if parties, because of the vagaries of the electoral system, don’t get a real say in political representation. Minority views are easily brushed aside.

REPRISE A DISCUSSION

It is a mischief that many have attempted to cure by opting for proportional representation in their voting systems, or variations thereof. It is also why Jamaica should reprise a discussion it has broached for decades, without ever fully debating.

At its simplest, proportional representation systems allocate seats in legislatures to political parties in proportion to the votes they win in elections, but usually with a minimum threshold for receiving seats (usually five per cent of the votes). Legislators, in this case, are drawn from lists put by parties prior to elections, rather than voters casting ballots directly for candidates.

In our case, with the electorate accustomed to voting directly for members of parliament, a mixed member proportional system, such as those used in New Zealand and Germany, would be worth discussing. In New Zealand’s case, Parliament has a minimum 120 members, a bit over half of whom are directly elected by constituents. The electorate gets two votes – one for the candidate and another for the party. The final number of seats a party receives is closely proportional to the votes it gets in the party votes. A party’s seats, therefore, are allocated first to the candidates who win in constituencies in the first-past-the-post-type arrangement. In other words, if the percentage of votes a party gets in the party is more than the number of seats won in the constituency election, the remaining votes go towards allocating seats from its list. On the other hand, if a party wins more constituency seats than it would be entitled to from its party votes, it keeps those seats and the ‘overhang’ is adjusted by allocating more seats to other parties.

In Germany, half of the Bundestag, the federal parliament, is elected directly by constituency votes, and the remainder chosen from the parties’ lists, in proportion to the votes they receive. Similar to New Zealand, and Guyana, which also has a proportional system, there are formulas for adjusting ‘overhangs’.