In the previous article,
I raised a number of reasons why the recent report of the Electoral Reform
Alliance deserves to be approached with a very sceptical attitude; these
included the ERA’s apparent domination by foreign government agencies and the
contempt of the report’s authors for democratic procedures such as elections.
In this and further articles, I will look at some of the report’s specific
complaints and suggested or implied “remedies”.
But these specifics
should always also be considered in terms of what they have in common. One is
that few of the criticisms are new, despite attempts in the media to portray
the report as something new. They have been heard before, and have mostly been
replied to by the government or the governing party.
Secondly, most of the
complaints or criticisms display an intention to portray the government in the
worst possible light. To cite just one example: the report spends three of its
60 pages criticising the “media environment” (especially television) for being
too favourable to the CPP. Nowhere does it mention that the media environment
includes free time provided on state TV to all parties to present their
platforms. Nor does it mention the large number of Cambodian newspapers, many
of which are critical of the government and/or supportive of the opposition.
Inequality among
provinces
One aspect of the ERA
report that may be new is its criticism of the inequalities in seat allocations
among provinces. It complains that one member of the National Assembly “in
Preah Vihear represents 260,034 constituents, while in Kep, one representative
represents 42,838 constituents. In Oddar Meanchey, an MNA represents 235,897
constituents compared with Kratie, with 121,294.”
It certainly sounds like
the ruling party has rigged things here, and the ERA will not say anything that
might disabuse you of that notion. For example, it will not point out that the
present system of representation by provinces has been in effect since 1993,
when it was instituted, not by the CPP, but by UNTAC, which no one except the Khmer
Rouge has ever accused of trying to favour the CPP.
Aside from who created
it, is the system wildly unfair? The answer to that depends on a number of
considerations.
The only electoral
system that could treat all voters’ ballots equally and still have proportional
representation would be one that treated the entire country as a single
electorate. Then the number of NA seats assigned to each party would be
determined by its percentage of the national vote. Such systems have not been
generally popular. The reason is that elected representatives do not represent
any specific location or section of the population, so voters have no
particular representative whose behaviour they can approve or disapprove of, no
specific representative they can ask for assistance or complain to about
government administration or the need for some piece of legislation; people in
less populated areas feel unrepresented.
At the other end of the
spectrum is a system similar to that used to elect the United States House of
Representatives, where districts are as close as possible to each other in
size, and each elects one representative. Such an arrangement treats all voters
equally and allows all voters to have one particular representative, but cannot
be made proportional; it is theoretically possible for the same party to win
50.1% in each district, and therefore to have all the representatives in the
parliament, while 49.9% of the population have no representative. Another
undesirable possibility – less theoretical, since it was the actual result of
the 2012 election in the US – is that the party that gets the largest number of
votes ends up with fewer representatives than a party that received
significantly fewer votes.
The electoral system in
Cambodia lies somewhere between the two extremes. It therefore has some of the
advantages and some of the disadvantages of each. This arrangement is of great
benefit to the authors of the ERA report, because it allows them to ignore the
advantages, focus on the disadvantages and pretend that these are the fault of
the government.
The ERA report considers
the inequalities between provinces in terms of population. Here, I use the
number of votes recorded in the 28 July election, which is another way of
illustrating the principles involved.
In Kep, the smallest
province by population, 19,624 votes were cast. The national total of votes was
6,627,159. So if Kep is taken as the standard, and every 19,624 votes are
entitled to one representative, the National Assembly would need at least 338
members.
But Pailin had 26,917
voters, which means it should have 1.37 representatives in a National Assembly
of 338 members and would therefore be either underrepresented or
overrepresented. To represent Kep voters and Pailin voters equally, Kep would
need to have 20 representatives and Pailin 27. That is, the voters of Kep and
Pailin could be given equal representation only by a national ratio of one
representative per thousand voters. Applying that ratio requires a National
Assembly of 6627 members. And it would get worse as inconvenient numbers in
other provinces entered the calculation.
The other way of
overcoming inequalities between provinces, without enlarging the National
Assembly to absurd numbers, would be to combine two or more provinces into a
single electoral district – so that, for example, Stung Treng, Ratanakkiri and
Mondulkiri would among them elect only one representative. This would shift
things towards the single-district end of the spectrum, at the cost of
depriving smaller provinces of a local representative.
The ERA report does not
advocate either such an enlargement of the National Assembly or such a merging
of provinces into larger electoral districts. All it does is criticise an
unavoidable choice between local representation and equality among voters, in
which improving one side makes the other side worse, and imply that this
dilemma, inherent in the election of representatives, is somehow the fault of
the government.
Redistribution
A subsidiary ERA
complaint is that redistribution of seats among the provinces has not been done
“in a decade”. This is a valid point, but not a very important one. It seems to
have been included only because the authors were tasked with raising every
possible electoral complaint, regardless of its significance.
The report reproduces a
simulation by the NDI of a redistribution. (The National Democratic Institute
is an agency created by the government of the United States, where electoral
redistributions occur only once in a decade, a fact to which the NDI has never objected.)
The implication of the
report is that an inaccurate distribution must somehow advantage the CPP.
However, for 14 provinces, the simulated redistribution causes no change in the
number of representatives. Five provinces would gain seats (Siem Reap two, and
one each in Battambang, Kampong Speu, Oddar Meanchey and Preah Vihear). Five
provinces would lose seats (two in Kampong Cham and one each in Kampot, Kandal,
Phnom Penh and Prey Veng). Would a redistribution have produced a different
election outcome?
The CPP and CNRP votes
in Kampong Cham and Siem Reap were close enough that reducing Kampong Cham’s
representation by two would mean that each party would lose one seat, and that
increasing Siem Reap’s representation by two would mean that each party would
gain one seat.
In Oddar Meanchey and
Preah Vihear, both of which the ERA redistribution would increase from one seat
to two, the 28 July vote would have given both extra seats to the CPP. In
Kampong Speu, where each party won three seats but the CNRP had a plurality, an
extra seat would have gone to the CNRP. An extra seat in Battambang would also
have gone to the CNRP. So far, that adds up to no net change.
Of the four other
provinces, each of which would lose a seat in the NDI’s redistribution, in Kampot,
where the CPP and CNRP each won six seats, the lost seat would have to be taken
from the CNRP, which trailed the CPP by 22,000 votes. In Prey Veng, where the
CNRP won six seats and the CPP five, the CNRP would have lost one seat if the
province’s representation had been reduced to 10. On the other side, a
reduction of one seat for Kandal and Phnom Penh would both have been at the
expense of the CPP. So here also, there appears to be no net change in the
number of representatives that would have been elected if the NDI’s simulated
redistribution had actually been carried out.
Hence it is clear that
the delay in redistribution could not have altered the overall election
outcome. Even more obvious and important, given the ERA’s perspective that
anything not perfect is the result of a CPP plot: no one could have calculated
reliably beforehand whether a redistribution would have benefited the CPP or
the opposition.
By Allen Myers