Labour demands fair play at election time

Labour Party deputy leader Michael Falzon yesterday accused the Nationalist Party and the government of dragging their feet and of failing to implement electoral law reforms on which both parties had agreed in October 2001.

Although the discussions had covered a lot of ground, the most burning issues were the right to vote for those abroad and the issue of court applications to bar those ineligible to vote.

Dr Falzon said a common document was drafted and where the parties still had divergent positions these were put in writing. The draft had to be sent to the Attorney General who had to draw up a Bill.

Although some legal amendments were subsequently made, they did not cover all the points that were discussed by the two parties.

Dr Falzon said the MLP felt that all those who were over 18 "and were contributing in any way to the country" had a right to vote and influence the future even if they were abroad.

"Our reasoning stems from the fact that there is a very large number of Maltese citizens living abroad. But we were also in favour of the concept that students as well as those seeking medical treatment or working abroad should be eligible to vote," he said.

"The only bone of contention was that the Nationalist Party wanted to include others, who were not contributing in any way to the country, to be entitled to vote as well. But I am sure that with some good will, we could have solved this issue too," he added.

Dr Falzon said the Constitution stipulated that one had to be living in Malta for 180 days in the 18 months prior to an election in order to have the right to vote. To be able to ascertain this, one needed an objective mechanism, which in the past came through embarkation cards.

"The MLP believes in freedom of movement and does not want the re-introduction of embarkation cards. But once the law is there, it should be respected and the government is in duty bound to provide the tools. Some other form of record-keeping must be set up.

"A simple way could be making one's passport number the same as that on the identity card and every time one travelled, the passport is machine read and that record could establish whether the constitutional requirement was being observed or not," Dr Falzon said.

He claimed that the failure to have the same number on both one's ID card and the passport was precisely meant to be able to fool around with the system.

Dr Falzon accused the Electoral Commission of not doing its duty in this respect.

"The MLP wants a fair game. We do not want to be advantaged or handicapped at elections," he said.

Dr Falzon said there was still scope for talks to continue.

"We still have to solve the district boundaries issue in order to ensure that no amount of gerrymandering would produce perverse results," he said.

One possible solution could be to add up all the quotas from each of the 13 districts and divide the number by 13 to obtain the national quota. One would then see what the difference in the first count votes between the parties was and divide it by the national quota. The resulting number would be the number of extra seats the winning party would have. Because the number was hardly ever likely to be a round figure, the result should be rounded up, thus strengthening governability of the country, Dr Falzon said.

If one had to use the method employed for past election results, the PN would have had two more seats than Labour in the 1981 election while the MLP would have had three more seats than the PN in the 1996 election.

"The system I am talking about works when the majority of votes does not reflect itself in a majority of seats and we would have solved most of the issues of possible gerrymandering affecting an election result," Dr Falzon said.

"Obviously, some other fine tuning would be necessary but changes can only take place if action is taken after discussions are concluded," he said.