As noted in two previous articles, the report
of the Electoral Reform Alliance released in early December is intended to
discredit Cambodia’s 28 July general election. The first article pointed out
that the ERA is dominated and funded mainly by a United States government
agency with a thoroughly anti-democratic record. The second debunked the
report’s claim that there was something deliberately unfair in the assignment
of seats to the provinces.
This article will look at the ERA’s claim that
there was something rigged or improper in the way that the proportional
representation system operated.
The report claims: “Proportional
representation implies that the number of seats allocated to a party should be
proportional to the number of votes that party has received. Yet the share of
seats for the CPP following the 2013 elections is higher than the party’s share
of the popular vote, mostly due to the single-member constituencies in nine
provinces (all of which the CPP won).”
As pointed out in the previous article, if
there is something wrong with the current voting system as such, the ERA should
be complaining to the UN: it was UNTAC, not the CPP, that instituted the
system. And while systems in different countries are not exactly the same, the
UNTAC-decreed system in Cambodia is not fundamentally different from
proportional representation systems in the rest of the world.
At war with arithmetic
But “proportional representation” has never
meant, and could not possibly mean, an exactcorrespondence
between the number of votes received and the number of representatives of a
party. Even less could it mean that this correspondence must hold good in each
electorate. When hundreds of thousands of people are voting for five or six or
eight representatives, there is no possibility of more than an approximate
match between the proportions of candidates elected and votes received.
A province with a small number of
representatives makes a seeming injustice in representation almost inevitable.
Single-member provinces give no representation to voters for any party but the
one with the largest vote – something that ought to be obvious even to people a
bit unhinged by partisan prejudices. A province with two representatives would
be highly proportional if two large parties share most of the votes roughly
equally, but if there are three parties with nearly the same number of votes,
one of them will appear to have been dealt with unfairly. Or if two large
parties split most of the vote 75%-25%, the result in that province has to be
unfair to one of them. As a general rule, proportional representation in any
electorate is more likely to be not very proportional the fewer are the number
of representatives to be elected.
As the ERA acknowledges, the CPP did better
proportionally because it won all of the provinces that elected just one
representative. Therefore, if the CNRP feels that it has received fewer seats
than it deserves, perhaps it should devote more effort to winning support in
more rural and sparsely populated areas.
It is true that, because of these mathematical
facts, the CPP won 55.28% of the seats with 48.83% of the vote. Such a result
is not unusual in other countries. In 2000, George W. Bush was elected US
president not only with a minority of the total vote (47.9%) but also with half
a million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. And what the ERA reportdoesn’t tell its readers is that the CNRP also won a share of seats marginally “higher than
the party’s share of the popular vote”, getting 44.46% of the vote nationally
and receiving 44.72% of National Assembly seats.
How was it possible for both the CPP and CNRP
to obtain a larger proportion of seats than their proportion of the vote? A
result like that is almost inevitable if there are even one or two parties
competing that do not receive enough votes to elect a candidate. In the recent
Cambodian general election, there were six such parties.
Those six parties received a total of nearly
450,000 votes, about 6.8% nationwide. The fact that they received no
representatives is not an injustice: they were not a single political force,
but stood for a variety of different platforms. But it meant that the CPP and
CNRP, with a combined 93.2% of the vote, would share 100% of the elected
representatives.
This situation is not the creation of the CPP,
or even of UNTAC. It is a product of arithmetic, which is normally politically
neutral: in a proportional representation election, whenever there is a
significant total vote for parties that do not win a seat, at least some of the
parties that do win seats will be overrepresented. If the system is a sensible
one, the party that wins the most votes will be overrepresented at least as
much as its competitors, because otherwise the extra representatives could give
the party with the second most votes a majority of seats.
Multi-member electorates
The report’s authors seem never to tire of
blaming the CPP for the laws of mathematics. For example, the passage quoted
above is immediately followed by: “Some non-single member constituencies saw
unequal results. In Siem Reap, for example, the CPP won 49.9% of the votes but
received 67% of the seats. In 11 provinces, CNRP’s share of seats was much
lower than their share of the popular vote.”
When one examines the details, it isn’t nearly
so dramatic. Of course, in the nine single-member provinces that the CNRP lost,
its share of seats was significantly lower than its share of the vote. As for
Siem Reap, it was electing six representatives. The voting numbers made it
immediately obvious that the CPP had won three seats and the CNRP two, so the
report’s dispute is only about the final seat. The legal formula gave that seat
to the CPP, meaning that it had 67% (4 out of 6) of the province’s seats. If
the ERA were advocating a different voting system rather than trying to
discredit the CPP, it would have added other examples, such as: In Svay Rieng,
the CNRP won 33.6% of the votes but received 40% of the seats. And if the sixth
seat in Sien Reap had been awarded to the CNRP, the CNRP would have received
50% of the seats with only 36% of the votes.
Furthermore, there is a clear attempt to
mislead readers in the ERA report’s statement that “the CPP won 49.9% of the
vote” in Siem Reap. More than 13% of voters in Siem Reap voted for smaller
parties. The implication that the CNRP should have received half of Siem Reap’s
seats would make sense only if all those smaller party votes were given to the
CNRP.
To make an honest judgment of the operation of
proportional representation in Siem Reap in this instance, one should compare
the votes of the two biggest parties against each other, not the vote of the
biggest party against the total vote. Of the votes in Siem Reap that did not go
to the six smaller parties, 57.9% were won by the CPP and 42.1% by the CNRP.
Four to two is obviously a fairer way than three to three for dividing six
seats between those two votes.
We have thus accounted for 10 of the 11
provinces of which the ERA complains. The 11th province is presumably Kratie,
which has been often mentioned in CNRP complaints, and which shows up in the
ERA report as a province in which the CNRP’s votes per representative elected
were very high. But again, things are not as the ERA suggests.
Kratie elects three representatives. The vote
for the five smaller parties that had candidates in Kratie totalled less than
7%, so there was no chance of one of those parties winning a seat. Therefore,
between the CPP and CNRP, the outcome had to be either 3-0 if the vote was
overwhelming for either, or 2-1, which is what happened. The result would have
to be 2-1 even if the winning party had only one more vote than the other. That
is not the fault of the CPP or of UNTAC, but of arithmetic and the fact that
members of the National Assembly cannot be divided into fractions of a person.
But in Kratie, the vote difference was considerably more than one: the CPP
outpolled the CNRP by more than 10,000 votes. Yet the ERA wants us to believe
that there is something illegitimate about the CPP receiving two of the
province’s three representatives and the CNRP receiving one.
Yes, if you compare the number of votes that
elected one CPP representative in Kratie with the number that elected one CNRP
representative, there is an obvious discrepancy. What the report doesn’t tell
readers is that any other distribution of seats would have made that
discrepancy worse.
‛Uneven results’
“An easy way to demonstrate uneven results for
the parties in elections is to divide each party’s
total vote by the number of seats it
obtained”, declares the report. That statement is true in isolation but a lie
in the context of the real world: it is a lie to pretend that there is any need
to “demonstrate” uneven results, when a moment’s thought makes it obvious that
election results are always going to be “uneven”.
The report then presents a chart showing the
number of votes that elected one representative in each of the 24 provinces.
And indeed – surprise! – these are “uneven”; arithmetical laws are just as
valid in Cambodia as they are in the rest of the world. What the chart doesn’t show is anything at all systematic about
this unevenness. In fact, in the 15 provinces that have more than one seat,
there are eight provinces in which it took more CPP votes than CNRP votes to
elect a representative and seven provinces in which the reverse was true.
While some voters in a province may feel that
something is not right if the party they voted for got only 50% of the
representatives while getting 54% of the vote, they need to remember that the
situation may be reversed in a neighbouring province. The only reliable key to
whether an electoral system is working adequately is whether the party that won
the most votes nationally won the most seats. Nobody has yet advanced a
detailed and convincing claim that the CPP did not receive about 300,000 more
votes than the CNRP on 28 July.
By Allen Myers
