1. Morning tweeps! As promised, I'm going to share some thoughts about yesterday's ConCourt decision on #electoralreform. Sorry it took me so long. I decided to read all 3 judgements (two concurring & one dissenting) and the Electoral Task Team report (Slabbert report) of 2003.
2. First thing is that the New Nation Movement & others were contesting the constitutionality of the Electoral Act (73 of 1998) which limits participation in elections to political parties. ConCourt agreed that the Act is unconstitutional and gave parliament 2 years to fix it.
3. What that means is that this case is about the *electoral system* and not the system of governance. What's the difference? An electoral system is the rules that determine how elections are done and how results are calculated.
4. The system of governance is whether we have a parliamentary or presidential democracy. In a presidential system the president is directly elected, in a parliamentary system the head of government comes to power through the legislature.
5. South Africa has a parliamentary system. Yes we have a head of state and government that we call the president. But they are elected by parliament at the first sitting of the national assembly after an election (sec 86 of the constitution). Only parliament may remove the pres.
6. The ConCourt case on #electoralreform was only about the Electoral Act, it was not about political system. So SA still has a parliamentary system with a president elected by parliament. That means we're not going to be able to directly elect the president in the next election.
7. What Concourt ordered is for parliament to change the Electoral Act to allow individuals to contest elections for national & provincial legislatures. So individuals can now be elected to parliament & 1 of those individuals can be elected as president by the national assembly
8. Parties can still contest the elections and the party with the largest majority in the national assembly is the most likely to have its presidential candidate become the president of South Africa.
9. Parliament has 24 months to decide what kind of electoral system to use to allow individuals to contest for seats in the national and provincial legislature. There are many options. Main constraint: the result must be "in general, proportional representation" (sec 46.1.d)
10. So the amendment of the Electoral Act is likely to result in a mixed system with both a constituency and proportional representation system. But this can take several forms. I'll mention two:
11. The ETT report recommended 69 "multi-member constituencies together electing 300 members of the National Assembly and a compensatory closed national list providing 100 members (total 400)". Each constituency would have 3 to 7 members. Parties & individuals could contest.
12. To allow for greater individual accountability, we could have an open rather than closed party list with voters influencing the order of candidates on the list. We could also have a recall provision to allow a constituency to recall an MP between elections.
13. A second option is to apply the system we use at local government (half seats from constituencies and half from PR) to national and provincial. This would require some other legislative changes to demarcate districts consistently.
14. The point of all of this is that we have a long complex process ahead of us. The ConCourt decision is a step closer to greater accountability but it's not a guarantee. Accountability doesn't come from the voting system, it comes from the political culture.
15. We need a bigger conversation about whether internal party systems promote democracy & accountability. We need a real conversation about the influence of money in our democracy because individual candidates can and will be "captured" too.
End.
End.
