Just how fair is Cyprus’s electoral system? Asked to comment on the petition filed by Anastasia Anthousi with the Electoral Court, seeking a recount of the ballots from one polling station in Nikitari, Nicosia district, Dr Elikkos Elia, Director-General of the Ministry of Interior and Chief Returning Officer, pointed to something bigger: the need for the House of Representatives to take a proper look at the electoral system itself.
How seats get carved up, and by extension how parliament members actually get elected, has been up for debate since the parliamentary elections. Take Dimitris Barros, elected as a parliament member in Paphos on just 286 votes, while other candidates, some with thousands of preference votes in other districts, some with far more personal votes in that same district, missed out entirely.
To be clear, though: Anastasia Anthousi’s objection isn’t about the electoral system or how seats get divided up. It’s a specific request to recount the ballots from one box at one polling station in Nikitari, a recount that, because of five votes, set off a domino effect of changes across the whole country.
Beyond Ms Anthousi, those affected include Evi Tsolaki, a DIKO candidate in Limassol, Michalis Michael, the resigned ELAM deputy leader, in Paphos, and Konstantinos Kyprianou of Direct Democracy in Kyrenia. Meanwhile, the ones who got elected were Andreas Papacharalambous of ELAM in Nicosia, Michalis Kounounis of DISY in Limassol, Dimitris Barros of Direct Democracy in Paphos, and Adamos Aspris of DIKO in Kyrenia.
All of which has kicked off a heated debate about the electoral system, and thrown up plenty of questions about this particular shift. Specifically: those five votes had originally been recorded for ELAM, only for it to later emerge that they actually belonged to EDEK. The correction cost ELAM five votes, which changed the second seat distribution, and set off the chain of changes that followed.
But the real question here, the one that matters beyond how Anastasia Anthousi’s objection is eventually resolved, is different: is Cyprus’s electoral system actually fair?
The answer, of course, isn’t black and white. Under electoral law, seats belong to parties, not to people. That means seats are handed out based on the percentage each party wins, not on how many preference votes an individual candidate racks up.
So once you accept that seats are distributed between parties, and that each district’s seats are fixed in advance, it’s entirely predictable, expected even, that you’ll get cases like Dimitris Barros in Paphos this time round, or Stavros Papadouris at the last parliamentary elections. A candidate scrapes together a few dozen or a few hundred votes and walks into parliament, while others with far more votes are left outside looking in.
Would it be fairer to elect, in each district, whichever candidates pulled in the most preference votes? Maybe. But would it actually be fairer?
Follow that logic through, and seat distribution would look completely different: the big parties would, in all likelihood, elect far more parliament members. The smaller parties, by contrast, would be left with fewer seats. Some of them might not win a single seat at all, and would be left with no parliamentary representation whatsoever.
What probably does need to change, though, is how seats get allocated in that second distribution, and one thing is certain: it should be worrying the House. It’s exactly the issue the Ministry of Interior’s Director-General raised in his comments a couple of days ago.
“We need to revisit our electoral system, particularly the question of the second distribution,” he said. At the same time, he noted that in the recent parliamentary elections, “a seat changed districts within five minutes, moved from one party to another, and ended up going to someone in Paphos district with a very small number of votes,” describing the situation as “soul-destroying” for the candidates involved.
