Party nominations the next big hurdle

By Alex Ndegwa

Past years have seen politicians enter into unholy alliances prior to elections in the name of securing a nomination to Parliament, but this trend may soon end.

According to the proposed constitution, the 12 nomination slots in the National Assembly, 20 in the Senate as well as those in county assemblies will be filled through party lists — a first in the country’s history.

Thus each political party will be required beforehand to nominate and submit a list of all the persons who would stand elected if the party were to be entitled to all the nomination seats.

This will uphold transparency in a hitherto secretive party exercise littered with broken promises and political patronage as members have been nominated at the whims of party leaders.

It is no wonder the change did not cut ice with MPs, as the report of the Committee of Experts alludes, noting the Parliamentary Select Committee "appears not to want the party list for Parliament".

PSC chairman Mohammed Abdikadir concedes using the total national vote for each party to determine allocation of additional seats could have been a fair basis.

Nonetheless he says the PSC resolved the proposed additional 80 constituencies should be delineated based on standard formula considering factors like population to address existing imbalances.

The Mandera Central MP explains it shall take into account a mean deviation of 30 per cent for all areas except 40 per cent for sparsely populated areas, and that the number of inhabitants in the constituency is nearly as possible equal to the population quota.

Population quota

Population quota means the number obtained by dividing the total population by the number of constituencies.

While the move is one in the right direction, PSC seems to have become a hostage of the status quo by opting not to take its radical changes further to the electoral system of assigning these additional seats.

The proposed constitution says the seats will be allocated to political parties in proportion to the total number of seats won by their candidates, just like is the case now.

This surely is not the best method to ensure fair (read proportional) representation for the parties. Arguably it ensures parties benefiting from the present winner-takes-all electoral system, also known as the first-past-the-post system of representation, only reap more.

Essentially, the first-past-the-post system means the candidate who gets the majority of the votes cast is declared the winner of the elections. It does not matter by what margin. So that even if the losers might have collectively commanded the majority vote the beneficiary of the split vote — not necessarily the most popular — carries the day. It is a system that translates to ‘wasted’ votes for if your preferred candidate is not the winner, your votes do not count.

Thus huge populations of electors are in essence under-represented. Similarly parties do not obtain seats proportionate to their total votes. For example in the 1997 elections, Kanu received 51 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly, but only 38 per cent of the parliamentary votes.

Designers of electoral systems have crafted proportional representation (PR) to address shortcomings associated with the winner-takes-all system. In PR, the number of seats that a party wins in an election is proportional to the amount of its support among voters.

Local representatives

One variation of PR is the Mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR) — a hybrid combining single-member constituencies with a proportional (party list) voting system. Half of the members of the legislature are elected in single seat contests and the other half are filled via a party.

The aim here is to allow voters to choose an individual local representative at the same time ensuring that all parties get their fair share of legislative seats.

The system is touted as offering the best of both worlds: Providing the geographical representation and close constituency ties of single-member plurality voting along with the fairness and diversity of representation that comes with PR voting.

"The MMPR is the best electoral system, which should be adopted in Kenya with a proportion of the seats elected from single-member constituencies and another proportion by PR," says Mr Willis Otieno of International Commission of Jurists (Kenya).

But for the system to work well, a threshold that parties must achieve before they qualify for seat allocation, say, at least five per cent of the votes cast nationally, should be set. Also, the number of seats to be allocated under PR and single-member constituency plurality contests must be established.

Several advantages arise from MMPR: First, it produces more accurate representation of parties in legislatures, while also ensuring that each local district (constituency in our case) has a representative.

Secondly, it wastes far fewer votes. Arguably many voters actually vote for candidates who lose and these votes are deemed wasted in the winner-takes-all system. In the 1997 elections, according to Otieno, approximately 34 per cent of electors voted for losing candidates. MMPR eliminates the wasted votes and misrepresentation by allocating seats according to the proportion of votes won by political parties.

Third, it eliminates gerrymandering, the manipulation of electoral boundaries in order to favour the incumbent party. The intention is to cheat some parties out of their fair share of seats. However, even if constituencies of unequal size are deliberately created to favour a particular party the proportion of votes will, to some extent, cancel the effects of such manipulation.

Fourth, MMPR assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women. For example, if the party they are supporting gets the required threshold of the total national vote their representatives automatically qualify for seat allocation.

A party would also feel obliged to put more women in its slates of the party list to avoid being branded chauvinists. Finally, it gives voters more choices of parties at the polls and increases voter turnout. Perhaps MPs should think about this, as debate begins next week on the proposed constitution.

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