European elections

The worry is that extremists will do well; it’s made worse by imperfect electoral systems. Every country has proportional representation (PR), so that’s good. But five, like France and Romania, have the primitive closed-list PR; voters choose only a party.  Seven have open-list PR, where they choose a specific candidate from one party. Eleven allow the voter a preferential ballot while just Ireland and Malta use the single transferable vote PR-STV (or ranked choice voting RCV), so they can cast preferences across both party and gender. 

The voting system of a pluralist democracy should enable its voters to be pluralist, that is, to cast preferences. A ‘yes’ for only one candidate, implying a ‘no’ to all of the others, cannot be an accurate reflection of the voter’s opinion. The collation of lots of inaccurate data will itself be inaccurate.

In a fully preferential system, as in Northern Ireland, moderate voters tend to vote across society’s various divides, so their ballots are fairly accurate. As it were by definition, extremists don’t like preferences. In other words, parties like Alternative für Deutschland benefit from Germany’s single-preference closed-list PR.

Ideally, an electoral system would be fully preferential: not just two preferences as in Slovakia, or three in Italy, but as many as the voter might want. And a good system would not only allow (as in Ireland) but actually encourage the voters to cast their preferences. Based on the ‘German’ Nicholas Cusanus’s points system of 1433, which, by historical accident, is called the Borda Count BC; developed in 1770 in France by Jean-Charles de Borda into today’s Modified Borda Count MBC; and in 1984 made proportional in England by Professor Sir Michael Dummett – (so it is very European) – this best electoral system is today’s Quota Borda System QBS.

Nationally, it’s not used anywhere (yet).

The Borda methodology worked quite well when introduced into L’Académie des Sciences in 1786 but one particular individual didn’t like it very much… he liked to control things himself. 

So, after the 1789 revolution, he went back to majority voting. He could choose the candidate. He chose himself. And, thus, in an 1804 referendum, Napoléon won 99.7 per cent of the vote and became l’empereur. He was, I suppose, a ‘democratic dictator’, like two other Europeans, Mussolini (98.3 per cent) and Hitler (88.2 per cent). 

But the first leader to ‘dictate properly’ and get 100 per cent was an Irishman, Bernardo O’Higgins, in Chile, who, in 1818, became El Supremo.

Peter Emerson – director, the de Borda Institute, Belfast

Justice

Justice will not be served well if the prosecution is not of the same calibre as the defence.

Carmel Sciberras – Naxxar