JIMMY MALISENI WEIGHS-IN ON PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION AT COUNCIL LEVEL

JIMMY MALISENI WEIGHS-IN ON PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION AT COUNCIL LEVEL Some people are wondering why UPND has been allocated the majority of local government PR seats even in councils where the party lost the local elections. Here is why. The published allocations show that this is not theoretical. It is what the system has actually produced. […]

JIMMY MALISENI WEIGHS-IN ON PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION AT COUNCIL LEVEL

Some people are wondering why UPND has been allocated the majority of local government PR seats even in councils where the party lost the local elections. Here is why.

The published allocations show that this is not theoretical. It is what the system has actually produced.

The law applies the national presidential vote to the allocation of PR seats in individual councils, rather than using the presidential vote obtained in those councils. This is something some of us flagged earlier, but that is now water under the Kazungula Bridge.

The consequence is especially stark because most councils have only three PR seats, one for women, one for youth and one for persons with disabilities. UPND has received all three seats in 86 councils, while it takes all four seats in another 19 councils. Opposition representation only begins to appear in the few councils with five seats and the one with six.

In other jurisdictions, PR generally follows the electoral unit: national PR is based on parties’ performance in national parliamentary elections, while local PR is based on parties’ performance in the respective council elections. Here, however, the national presidential result is repeatedly imposed on individual councils, regardless of how parties performed locally.

The result is that even where UPND lost a council, district or province, it still takes most or all the PR seats because it won the national presidential election.

The scale of the distortion is revealing. While the national presidential vote was roughly a 60/40 % split between HH/UPND and BM/the opposition, the party allocation in Appendix II, attached here, as produced by the ECZ gives UPND 371 of the 380 seats accounting for about, 98%, while NRPUP got 9 seats, or about 2%. That is not a reflection of the national vote; it is an overwhelming conversion of the national winner’s advantage into local government representation.

The problem is therefore not merely the formula. It is the combination of using a national vote to allocate local seats and having too few seats in most councils to produce meaningful proportional representation.

In effect, what is called proportional representation has become a winner-takes-all arrangement in the overwhelming majority of councils.