Ukraine’s speaker believes future MPs are not for sale
Posted by the Editor on January 13, 2012
News / 13 January 2012 | 14:43
Ukraine’s speaker believes future MPs are not for sale
Speaker of Ukraine’s parliament Volodymyr Lytvyn believes that in the new parliament, elected on mixed system, the political forces will not be able to buy deputy, elected on majority system, ForUm correspondent reports.
Speaking at a press conference, Lytvyn said that MPs by majority will feel their responsibility before voters. “Taking into account challenging pre-election battles, I’d love to see that deputy, who will sell himself to the first proposition after he will have broken through election obstacles and will have overrun his rivals and then. An MP by majority will know his value and will follow his voters, if he wants to live a long political life, of course,” the speaker said.
ForUm
Ukrtoday said
Lytvyn is a fool. He is either naive or deliberately seeking to mislead the electorate. The mixed Member system was existed in 2002 and it did not work.
The problem is the term “majority” is misleading. It really means the candidate with the highest vote. Analysis of first round of voting in the 2010 presidential elections shows that it is possible for a candidate to win a “Majority” seat with less then 30% of the vote. If is also false to say that the majority system prevents buying of seats. It does not.
In order for a candidate/party to gain an advantage they only need to encourage ,multiple opposition candidates to run against each other this splitting their vote and reducing a combined opposition chances of securing the highest vote.
A preferred option would be to introduce Preferential “Ranked voting” where candidates are ranked in order of preference (1, 2 3 etc) If no candidate has 50% or more votes the candidate(s) with the least votes are excluded and their votes redistributed according to the voters next available preference of choice until one candidate has 50% support
Even then there are still problems with the single member electorate system
Candidates with over 50% support are under valued and candidates with less then 50% over valued.
A preferable option would be to introduce open list multi-member local electorates (each electorate returning 5 or 9 members of parliament on a quota of 16.6% or 10% respectively). Each electorate MUST return the same number of candidates to be of equal value.
BUT this is Ukraine and Democracy and representative government is non existent.