Adopting the minority view of the ministerial probe for little change, leaves a deep internal flaw untouched
I was part of the ministerial advisory committee majority that advocated for more radical changes to the electoral system than the ANC is now contemplating. I want to say something in partial mitigation of the ANC’s choice of minimal changes before I point to a deep internal flaw in the minimalist option and reflect on what is lost by not pushing for more radical changes.
There are possible ways around this problem. One is via a voting system that redistributes surplus votes from the winning independent to some other set of candidates, for example via single transferable vote. Another is by doing what we do in local government: combining single-member constituencies with party-list candidates to achieve overall proportionality. This avoids the need to redistribute votes.
If a Nelson Mandela stood as an independent and won 50% of the national vote, he would be able to translate that into only one seat — his own. You might say: an independent who believes they can win more than one seat’s worth of votes will be likely to form a party anyway, so that they can gain more seats. But ironically, they can do this already. This is what Mamphela Ramphele did with Agang, and Patricia de Lille with Good. The ANC’s preferred tweak will instead give independents the opportunity to stand without associates, thus potentially increasing the number of wasted votes and reducing proportionality accordingly.
A difficulty here is that the Constitutional Court did not capture what is wrong with the existing system. It addressed what it was invited to — the right to stand independently. But the problem with the current system is not lack of independents. It is that voters are not able to vote for individual MPs and hold them accountable, and that they lack local representation. There are any number of proportionality-friendly ways to provide for these.
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