TREVOR SUDAMA
MUCH HAS been made of the results of the July 4 general election in the UK in which the Labour Party won with 412 seats in a 650-seat House of Commons. This figure represents 63.4 per cent of the total number of seats and enabled the party to form a government with an unprecedented majority.
However, the Labour Party received only 33.7 per cent of the votes cast. In other words, the other parties and independents won 66.3 per cent of the votes but the seats occupied in the House do not reflect this stark reality. Under the first-past-the-post system, votes cast for candidates other than those cast for the ones with the most votes in a constituency (even winning by a single vote) do not count and are of no value in determining seats won in the legislature.
The above outcome points to a great deficiency of the first-past-the-post voting system as a means of reflecting full democratic choice at the polls and a more just, fair and realistic diversity of voter preferences for representation in the legislature.
In TT’s case, the first-past-the post system has generally produced governments with less than 50 per cent of voting support.
In 1956 the PNM won only 38 per cent of the votes cast, but was able to obtain a majority of seats in the Legislative Council.
In 1961 it obtained 54 per cent of the votes, but 67 per cent or two-thirds of seats in the Legislative Council in the face of vigorous protests of voter rigging through the use of voting machines.
In 1971 there was a no-vote campaign and the PNM won a mere 28 per cent of the votes and all the seats in the House of Representatives.
In the1981 general election the Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR) received about 20 per cent of the votes cast, but no seats in the House.
In the 1986 election the PNM obtained close to 40 per cent of the votes, but only three seats (one-eleventh) in the House.
In 1991 the combined votes of the NAR and UNC were much more than those for the PNM, but the latter won the most seats with a minority of the votes.
In the 2007 general election the Congress of the People (COP) won 23 per cent of the votes, but no seats in the House. In fact, of the 11 general elections to date which the PNM has won since 1956, only in two has the party been able to obtain more than 50 per cent of the votes cast.
The first-past-the-post electoral system has tremendously benefitted the PNM and it is solidly wedded to it.
One recalls that, after holding meetings, receiving proposals and deliberating over a two-year period, the Hugh Wooding Constitution Reform Commission recommended in 1974 not full proportional representation as a means of electing members to the House of Representatives, but a hybrid system of half the total number of seats to be determined by the first-past-the-post system and half by proportional representation. Even this compromise recommendation was rejected out of hand by the then PNM government.
The other political parties which may stand to benefit from proportional representation are l
