During her Republic Day speech, President Myriam Spiteri Debono once again mentioned the need for electoral reform. In a speech later on the same day, the prime minister too touched upon the subject. It is not the first time the occupants of the highest offices in the country spoke of the need to make amendments to the current system.

Despite regularly mentioning the need for electoral reform, no details have yet been shared of what needs to be reformed. So, today, I am putting pen to paper to ask a few pertinent questions which need answering from the political class. I will also offer a few suggestions which will hopefully initiate a well-needed debate.

Firstly, we need to distinguish between the electoral system and the electoral process. The former refers to the formula by which an election is conducted. Apart from the calculation of the quota, other matters such as ballot-paper design and the number of electoral districts all form part of the electoral system.

On the other hand, matters such as the vote counting, the timelines of vote distribution, candidates’ applications, etc. all form part of the electoral process. In my opinion, both require adjustments.

Before attempting to reform the current electoral system, one question needs to be answered: Do we want to stick with the PR-STV or should we abandon our 100-year-old system and switch to one of the other systems commonly used across the democratic world?

I am not anticipating any attempts from anyone to switching to a completely different system. So, let’s assume that we will be reforming the current one. Where do we start?

There are a hundred and one amendments that can be considered both in the system and the process. Most of them will definitely find compromise among the political class which will ultimately have to legislate. Other amendments may be controversial and will require a lot of negotiations.

For this reason, one should get on with the amendments which are non-controversial. One such amendment is the number of electoral districts. Currently, Malta is divided into 12 districts and Gozo is the 13th. In every election, Naxxar and Fgura always end up in two different districts.

Żebbuġ also suffered the same fate at the last general election.

My suggestion is to have six electoral districts in Malta and Gozo would remain a separate region. Each candidate will only be permitted to stand in one district, thus eliminating the need for casual elections (and the anomalies they bring about). Such a reform will ensure that localities are not split. Furthermore, the threshold in a district will go down from 16.6 per cent to 9.09 per cent.

The winning leader will have the full parliamentary group in place by Sunday night- Hermann Schiavone

The winning leader will have the full parliamentary group in place by Sunday night and can form the new government without having to wait for casual elections results, generally held two weeks after a general election.

If any reform is to be conducted, the composition of electoral districts ought to be the first to be done.

We are now just over two years away from a general election and it is only fair for candidates to get to know which localities will be forming their district.

I had occasionally informally discussed this subject with MPs from both sides of the house and I can safely say that, from what I gathered, the political class has no issues with this change. So, what are we waiting for?

The biggest mistake that we can make when reforming our electoral system is to wait until an agreement on all matters is reached before moving forward. There will surely be controversial matters that an agreement will be hard to reach. Should we stall the whole process for any lack of agreement of unrelated matters?

In the past, the main political parties showed maturity when faced with electoral defects and crises which required amendments. We should not wait for such an eventuality to sit on the table of discussions.

The time is now.

I have, today just mentioned one amendment which should not take long to find consensus. There are other changes that require deep discussions. One such issue is the length of time to get a result. A small adjustment in the ballot-paper design could speed up the announcement of the result by hours.  We could actually have a result by 7am.

Well, that and other matters are subjects for another day.

Let’s just get on with it.

Hermann Schiavone is a political analyst and elections’ expert.