Voting changes

President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced this week that the recently held elections, to the Provincial Councils in the Eastern, North Central and Sabaragamuwa provinces, would be the last in which the number of preferential votes polled would be a criterion for appointing Chief Ministers.

He said this in his address to the newly-elected provincial councillors, ministers and chief ministers of the three provinces, during the ceremony for their swearing in held at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo Fort on Monday.

Outlining the background to this decision, the President explained that the existing system caused a lot of problems and had given rise to much criticism. The rivalry for preferential votes caused of revenge issues among members of the same party, as well as between different parties. Only a handful was given appointments as ministers due to constitutional limitations, and from this arose allegations that suitable qualified people were left out of positions of power.

He said that such problems regarding preferential voting would not occur in the future because the government had decided to conduct future elections to local government bodies and to Provincial Councils on an electorate or ward basis.

Preferential vote

Significantly, associated with the President at this assembly was Water Supply and Drainage Minister and Chief Government Whip Dinesh Gunawardena, who has long been an advocate of electoral reform.

The President reiterated this position on Thursday, during a Temple Trees breakfast for newspaper Editors and other senior personnel. Emphasising that the electoral law relating to local government needed to be amended to do away with the preferential vote, he set a target date for a Bill to be brought to Parliament, to introduce this and other reforms - October 10.

Many potential political candidates - as well as most of the voting public - will undoubtedly breathe a sigh of relief at this development. It is no secret that the ‘manaapa yuddhe’ (‘battle for preferences’) has distorted the political picture in this country and caused hardship to candidates.

The preference vote measure was originally introduced to reduce criticism that the voters had no choice in electing their representatives under proportional representation. The first-past-the-post system of voting had caused lop-sided results and under-representation for smaller parties and these faults were to be corrected by means of proportional representation.

Unfortunately, the new system meant that people had little say in who was actually elected to represent them, merely in which party was to do so. The secretary of a given party had the power to appoint members from the list. Preference votes helped give voters more control over who was actually appointed. However, the cure was worse than the disease. Voters from less populous electoral districts found themselves deprived of a deputy, whereas those from more densely inhabited areas found themselves with several. This led to more work being done for people in areas with a bigger population.

For the candidates themselves, a huge monetary investment became necessary to carry out propaganda. Whereas earlier each candidate had to challenge their opponents in their own area, now it became essential to have the resources to challenge the candidates of their own party within a much larger area.

The financial outlay needed for a candidate to get elected became enormous. This meant that the candidates should be wealthy in their own right or else had to be obligated to rich sponsors - a large number drawn from a class of businessmen on the margins of legality, whose need for patronage also bordered on the illegal. This has caused a Rightward shift in the field of political battle, away from the ‘have-nots’ towards the ‘haves’, specifically towards new rich black money.

Monitoring members

Furthermore, personalities, rather than issues and policies, became the paramount concern. This degraded the level of political discourse, leading directly to the verbal abuse which is regularly hurled across the floor of each representative assembly on this island.

The level of competition was worse, the lower down the representative ladder. While at Provincial level all power is held by five ministers, in local government one person (Mayor or Chairperson) is omnipotent. The convention (not, it should be pointed out, a constitutional provision) for appointing Chief Ministers and heads of local government on the basis of their preferential vote exacerbated the amount of competition for preferences.

In recent years the situation has got much worse. Candidates have begun regarding their own party colleagues as the principal enemy, not the candidates of other parties. This trend reached its culmination at the recent hustings, with two separate major clashes reported, the first between members of the United National Party, the other between supporters of the incumbent United People’s Freedom Alliance.

The intended legislation is timely and will, it is hoped, prevent a further deterioration of the situation. We also hope it will embrace greater democratisation within the structures of the devolved administrations as well. Provincial Councillors and members of Municipal and Urban Councils and Pradeshiya Sabhas have little power unless they are members of the Provincial Cabinets or Mayors or Chairpersons. In local government bodies, their vote on budgets can be overridden. This situation has to change.

The government obviously recognises this problem, since the President has said that Provincial Councillors would be appointed as monitoring members to scrutinize the activities of their own councils. These powers need to be extended down the line to members of the lowest local government bodies.

It is to be hoped that the changes to be embodied in the forthcoming legislation will go far enough to eliminate the existing drawbacks in the system. At the same time, sufficient checks and balances should be incorporated to preserve the democratic rights of the people, so that the faults of the old first-past-the-post system are not repeated.