Serious flaws in the North’s electoral system

ALWAYS discussed in a ‘by the way’ manner, voter apathy is an issue addressed in the wake of almost every election or referendum.

The assembly elections in Northern Ireland last week, however, did not suffer from significant voter apathy, with a relatively high voter turnout of 63.5%.

The weighty issues at stake on this occasion ensured a high turnout but the Northern Ireland system is itself structurally flawed in a way that means its community is poorly served by such elections, despite a high level of participation.

Northern society is still very divided and this is reflected in the polarisation of last week’s results — but the electoral system itself has some notable negative externalities.

The electorate is being short-changed in one particular area that those in the South, who share the same electoral system, do not suffer.

The mechanisms set up under the Good Friday Agreement were initially structured in the hope of facilitating increased participation and representation of minority groups, but the system allows for far too many MLAs, which results in adverse side effects.

It takes very few votes to get elected to the Northern Assembly, with many MLAs getting fewer than 3,000 first-preference votes, with the quota only being met by the transfer of preferences from senior party members within the individual’s constituency and not between intra-party transfers.

The pragmatism and flexibility the PR-STV (proportional representation by single transferable vote) system allows individual voters is somewhat negated as a result of three, four or five members of the same party standing in a six-seat constituency.

I believe in a balkanised society having less choice, and being forced to think outside the parameters of competing nationalisms could have more social utility than the present system of disproportionately encouraging inter-community voting patterns.

A second, more important, fact is that the region has 108 elected representatives for its small population of 1.7 million.

Elected representatives are elected to represent but also to get things done; excessive representation has the result that far too many individuals have an entitlement to be heard in the most important decision-making arena of all. This is democratically impractical and will lead to the formation of both piecemeal and poor legislation.

‘Over-representation’ may appear to be a self-contradictory concept but it will have tangible effects, in particular the stalling of progress on issues which really matter to the electorate.

Interested parties in the south often think the elected MLAs are unrepresentative of the wider community in the North when, in fact, the PR-STV system and the amount of elected members mean that far from being unrepresentative, they are far too representative.

Shaun Gavigan

14 Auburn St

Phibsborough

Dublin 7