Thoughts on Electoral Reform (5)

Elections in Mauritius Are Seldom Referendums

Vote share doesn’t matter that much in Mauritius. We instead have competitions in 21 unequal ridings and the party which grabs anything more than half of the contested seats earns the right to form government. Our first-past-the-post (FPTP) setup is a system which works and has served us really well. And that too for decades. Making it an important part of who we are. Just like progressive taxation and a high savings rates have until 2006. Important matters of the state need to be given the appropriate consideration. It’s definitely not a bad idea that we let ourselves be inspired by examples of profound thinking. Like what Feynman told us about hardware reliability of the Space Shuttle: the necessary redundancy was provided by several independent identical computer systems.

What We Don’t Want

If we want to learn about at a system that doesn’t work we just need to look at what happened in Rodrigues where the wish of the people has been frustrated with a mixed-system – something our electoral system should be immunised against. And where a bigger dose of proportional representation (PR) did not solve anything except perhaps gifting Rodrigues with one of the most ridiculous population/MP ratios in the world. 21 representatives for a population of about 42,000 puts our sister island at the undesirable 187th spot (out of 193). A ministerial committee was setup to look into the matter but it appeared to be doomed from the start.

The Duval Committee Was Going Nowhere

Essentially because of two things: the process and the PR. As far as the process goes it was like that Faugoo Committee we had a couple of years ago. I guess you recall how there was not only way too little dissent in that group but it essentially used a heavily-discredited report as a base. That report was such a complete joke that Ramgoolam took 389 days to publish it disguised as his white paper but gave us only 42 days to comment on it. It was far worse than fer lisyin vey sosis. It was more like lisyin pe eksplike kuma pu vey sosis. They did invite suggestions from the public but these were never shared back with them which is another example of dissent suppression.

If You Would Be Well Served…

The Duval Committee didn’t fare any better. One of the recommendations it approved in a hurry was from Nicolas Von-Mally who thought that party leaders should appear on both lists: FPTP and PR. How brilliant is that when we know that would make it a lot more difficult for voters to keep political leaders out of assemblies? Isn't that a sure recipe to slow down the renewal of our political class? Which by the way hasn't exactly been happening at three hundred thousand kilometres per second.

Serve Yourself

We shouldn't forget that Mr. Von-Mally was first elected in 1987 and is the leader of one party. So was the Chairman of the Duval Committee. Another party leader. Mr. Collendavelloo is also on that committee. He was first elected in 1983. And is the leader of still another party. There seemed to be some kind of serious conflict of interest there and given the other recommendations that committee has approved it will simply be a miracle if an overwhelming majority of voters don't believe that this is a committee of the leaders, by the leaders and for the leaders. But it is comforting that the Rodrigues Regional Assembly (RRA) has used a minimum of good sense to reject the crappy recommendations. We know that we don’t want to add a dose of PR to the excellent FPTP system because both of our Parliaments are already too big. For instance our National Assembly currently sits like in the bottom quartile of 193 parliaments worldwide when it comes to the population/MP ratio. Not something an aspiring Tiger should be proud of.

Reviving the Process

Government should immediately make the Duval report public. This would allow scrutiny by voters. It should also release the suggestions that were sent after the controversial white paper was published in 2014. There might be something in there that could enrich the conversation. We’ll obviously need some time – at least a few months – to go through them and iterate to something mindful for Rodrigues.

Options Squandered

The flawed process of the Duval committee has somewhat squandered our options given that elections in Rodrigues are due soon. All is not lost though as we propose below a solution that can end the electoral quagmire in Port-Mathurin. It’s a refinement of something we proposed recently.

Meet The MOS

We know that the main problem of the FPTP system is that it deprives voters of an opposition of adequate size when it is needed the most. That’s most apparent when we get 60-0s. The good news is that we can fix that without going with the very unpredictable PR. All we need to do is to determine the minimum opposition size (MOS) and this will automatically give us the maximum number of additional seats to be granted. The following equation helps us do just that.

where FPTP seats is the number of such seats in our assemblies (62 for Mauritius and 12 for Rodrigues) and % votes opp is the transformed share of votes obtained by the most important unsuccessful party in the two 60-0s. Basically it’s the formula that answers the following question: what is the maximum number of additional MPs we should have so that their percentage of the total seats – FPTP plus additional – in our National Assembly doesn’t exceed a given number.

Finding MOS

Computing the % votes opp is easy. We take the smaller of the two vote shares of the most important unsuccessful parties in the two 60-0s. That’s 19.8% in 1995. We divide this number by 2 as we want to avoid what has happened in Rodrigues at all costs and because only unsuccessful candidates from parties/alliance that did not win the elections will be eligible for additional seats. Dividing by two will also offer some protection against situations we cannot foresee. We get 9.9%. We round it down to 9% -- as a further measure of precaution -- and plug it in the above formula to yield 6.13 seats. We round the result down to 6 as a final measure of prudence. We’re done. All that’s left is to pick up to 6 of the unsuccessful candidates with the biggest share of votes.

Voters Rank Unsuccessful Candidates Wisely

We’ve shown that recently. Indeed with our approach SSR would have been the first pick in 1982. So would have SAJ in 1995. This makes a lot of sense as they collected the highest percentage of votes among unreturned candidates. Our formula respects the choices expressed by the people without inflating a Parliament that’s already too big. Something which the current BLS and a dose of PR do not.

A Timetable To Move Forward

The smallest change we could implement is to adopt the concept of a minimum opposition size. If there isn’t 6 MPs in the opposition we pick enough from those unsuccessful opposition candidates who got the highest percentage of votes until there is. That means no additional MPs will be selected if we get a less dominant result than 56-6. It’s a small tweak we can apply to our FPTP system that keeps all of its advantages while taking care of a whole range of cases where it generates an outcome that’s a little bit unsatisfactory. This is a minor change that our Parliament can definitely approve in the first half of 2017 for the next general elections only so we satisfy the UNHRC ruling. And when we are in the voting booth we can also decide whether it becomes the default mechanism to allocate additional seats.

The second change would be to revert to 40+2 single member constituencies (SMC). Something similar to what we had in 1959 and 1963 but which will need to be updated by the Electoral Boundaries Commission. This setup would yield an MOS of 4.15 MPs which we round down to 4 to guard us against unpredictable outcomes. We should get down to work immediately so that the next time we are electing a government we can also answer yes or no to a question like “Do you want to revert to SMCs like we had in 1959 and 1963?”.

A Solution For Rodrigues

We do away with the 6 PR seats and instead apply the formula above by just changing the FPTP seats variable to 12 to yield an MOS of 1.19. Which we round down to 1. Which means that we’ll pick the unsuccessful candidate with the highest vote percentage as the sole additional candidate only if we get a 12-0. And how do we deal with a tie of 6-6? We let the unsuccessful candidate with the highest vote percentage break the tie. She could be from one of the two groups or from another party.

Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, part 7, part 8

and part 9 of this series.