In Sunday’s editorial, “Counting Votes”, in light of the Carter Centre’s Report on our 2015 elections, we reviewed our history on the impact of voting systems on the political behaviour of voters in our ethnically divided society. Their assessment was, “Overall, while these elections represent a step forward in Guyana’s democratic development, there is much work to be done to ensure governance is inclusive and elections become more routine and less traumatic to the nation.”
The Report made several recommendations to address the still persistent problem of Governments being formed by majorities located in one or the other major ethnic groups – Indian and African Guyanese – and not securing the widespread legitimacy (to be more “inclusive”) to distribute Guyana’s national patrimony more equitably. Yesterday, we dealt with the recommendation that suggested the electoral rules should, “Ensure geographic seats are more equitably distributed among electors.”
There were two other recommendations that stood out and they bear repetition in full:
“Allow Individual Candidates to Stand for President. International obligations on the right of people to stand for election allow for independent candidates. The constitutional rules in Guyana limit all candidature for the office of the presidency and for membership of the National Assembly to those who join party lists. This is an unreasonable limitation on the freedom of association and on the right to run for election. An amendment to the Constitution is necessary to effect this change, and this should be considered as a matter of some urgency in order to allow independent candidates to participate in elections.”
If candidates were to run for the presidency separately from their parties, this could possibly represent a seismic change in the politics of Guyana. We would, in effect, be moving towards the system that exists in France and Sri Lanka. There it becomes possible for the President to originate from outside the party that may capture the majority of seats at the subsequent parliamentary elections and which would then proffer the Prime Minister. The virtue of this system is to open up the choice of possible candidates away from the formal party structures that may tend to select individuals who are caught within procrustean structures that exclude outsiders.
In France, for instance, Emmanuel Macron does not belong to either of the two major entrenched parties and there is great hope that he will be thinking outside of the box to deal with the challenges that confront his nation. In Guyana, the Carter Centre would be hoping, as so many others have done in the past, for some “unifying” leader to rise up, who would transcend our ethnic cleavages. In our estimation, however, the suggestion is utopian, since it rests on premises that are not realistic in our milieu.
The Carter Centre had a second suggestion that also seeks to have elections produce individuals who have acceptability across the ethnic fences: “In addition, in light of the history of ethnic polarisation, Guyana might want to consider preferred, or ranked, voting for president in which voters award votes ranked on an ordinal scale to all candidates in the race, and the winner is the candidate who wins the most total votes. This places an incentive on candidates to appeal to voters across party and communal lines.”
In Preferential or ranked Choice Voting, the voter is allowed to rate his choices from the available names, with “1” being his first choice and so on. There are many variants, and the one used in Australia, the “Instant Runoff Voting”, is typical. As described by Wiki, “If no candidate is the first choice of more than half of the voters, then all votes cast for the candidate with the lowest number of first choices are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on who is ranked next on each ballot. If this does not result in any candidate receiving a majority, further rounds of redistribution occur.”
This allows persons who are acceptable to voters from outside their base to win.
