By Mary Lou Gutscher, in response to an article on Multiple Member Proportional in Bulletin.
I just read your article on electoral reform and I wanted to share my view with you, and with other party members too, if there is a way to do that before the election.
What you say is correct – that a minority government will go to the party with the least necessary number of votes to get a majority on any issue.
However, that party could be the Libertarian Party, and/or the Libertarian Party and other minority parties could form their own coalition to become the block needed to put through any given vote in parliament.
In Costa Rica, they have proportional representation – voting for the party only (and perhaps voting separately for the president, but not for individual candidates). The parties present their slate of candidates in the order that they would become congressmen, given enough votes. The process of assigning seats includes “topping up” votes for the minor parties, with the “spare” votes left over from the more popular parties, to give the smaller parties a chance.
For example – if the number of votes required to gain a seat in any given province was 5,000 (the number of votes cast divided by the number of ridings in the province), and the most popular party received 47,988 votes – the popular party would gain 9 seats, and 2,988 votes would go into the kitty for the smaller parties. In the case of the Movimiento Libertario in Costa Rica, they got say, 4,399 votes and took another 601 votes from the kitty to top them up to one seat.
The person listed as number one for the ML party was Otto Guevara, a successful lawyer – smart, attractive, and influential in the business community where he lived. He persuaded several of the other smaller parties with one seat, to form a coalition of 7 seats and took on the role of chairman. He volunteered for any committees that he could possibly get on, and became the central communicator for those he was not on. He also had a pager whose number was only given to the media and he established himself as the go-to person for everything that was going on in committee.
Within his first term, he became known as the “champion of the poor” for his stand on taxes and favouritism, and he challenged the government 21 times on constitutional issues, including once stopping them completely from borrowing money for current expenditures. He had a single theme for his term in office – I’m paraphrasing it to say that there is too much government in our lives – and that’s what he came back to on every issue. He also had the allotted funding from the government for a research assistant, office, etc. but he got voluntary contributions to increase his team by at least one, and I think two other researchers and writers, so that he could appear to be on top of everything all the time.
The next election, there were 6 ML candidates elected, and they took over key positions on various committees, including one of them heading up the finance committee.
I’d just like the members to know, that it’s not just the other small parties (socialist though they may be) who can benefit from proportional representation. And I do think that proportional representation is a more democratic process. Since we live in a “democratic” society, leaving aside for the moment that it means two wolves and a chicken deciding by majority vote what to have for dinner, and since the Libertarian Party is involved in that electoral process, I think it perfectly appropriate to vote in favour of proportional representation. I also believe that it offers an ideal opportunity for a bright Libertarian candidate with great communication skills to have a huge impact on legislation.
The format for assigning seats may not be perfect, but getting the principle of proportional representation established more than makes up for it.
Gosh, it feels good to write again!!
All the best, Jim.
For liberty,
Mary Lou