Kalistan

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Kalistani Election monitors certify Tukarese Elections
"Mostly Clean," "Some discrepancies noted", said monitors
Sangon, Tukarali
June 19, 5638


Electoral Map shows District Winners in Tukarese Federal Elections of April 5638

Kalistani election monitors have released their final report from the 5638 General Elections in Tukarali. Election monitors were asked to observe the elections to verify that there were no significant issues with the process of the election, that the results represent the views of the voters, and that the election occured across the country cleanly. The monitoring process is designed to help the voters of Tukarali be confident that the process itself is fair and that the government is making steps to ensure integrity of the election process as the government continues its transition to democracy.

"Two free and fair elections in a row generally signifies that a state is out of significant danger of backsliding into authoritarianism," said Program spokeswoman Ana Pontin, who teaches Comparative Government at Suldanor Duchy University. "We can be confident that elections which produce results that people believe in demonstrate that institutionalization of democratic norms has begun to take hold, as people become used to having their voices reflected in vote counts. That combined with the promotion of civil society institutions and the protection of civil liberties is the surest way to deepen a democratic transition."

Kalistan was invited to monitor the elections because they do not have a stake in the outcome, and therefore can provide neutrality. "This is the opportunity for our students and graduate assistants to gain some real world experience in application of theory in practice," said Pontin. "We require that they have substantial working knowledge of both the language and the political culture, history and institutions of the place that we are monitoring, and in this case, were able to put together a team of more than 250 individuals to come down to Tukarali for a total of two weeks to monitor setup, conduct of election and the final counting all across the country."

The results were positive for Tukarali. "We have found that the election was clean and fair, and in general, reflected the will of the people," said Pontin. "There were no major instances of vote suppression, or voter intimidation by the state or security auxiliaries. Nearly all the people we spoke with both before and after casting their vote said that they have faith that this election result will be fair and will reflect what majorities ask for, and all major parties were given ample opportunity to campaign, to attempt to influence votes, to distribute materials, and to hold rallies for their supporters. Our team confirms what the Tukarese Government has claimed: The results show that Mr. Caetano was the winner of the overall vote, and the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) won a bare majority in the National Legislature."

Final tallied results were similar to reported exit polls from confirmed voters. "In each of 180 sample constituencies, When asked 'What Party did you vote for?' reported votes were never more or less than 3% points away from what the polls reported the final tally was. In only 7 instances, the reported exit polling deviated from the actual vote count far enough that a switch would have changed the outcome of the election. This is in less than 5% of the sampled precincts. No case would the difference have altered the final outcome of the evening. Therefore we can say that the results accurately reflect the stated desire of the voters." Legislative elections generally mirrored federal Presidential results as well.

The major issues came in two areas: There is significant over and under representation of a winner given the Single Member District, First Past the Post system which tends to award an election to a Party which wins a plurality, rather than either allocating legislators proportionately or requiring a majority by instant runoff or single transferrable vote. "The result is that in many districts, the candidate who won actually got less votes that two or three of the other candidates combined, but since they split the opposition vote, the candidate who got less votes actually won" said Pontin.

"This leads to undercounts and decreases the power of protest voting," said Pontin. "We saw a great example of this deficiency in the Capital of Sangon, where the winner of the 8th District was the plurality winner, PDP candidate Vicente Salles de Freitas. Mr. Salles de Freitas won with 28% of the vote. In a 2 party system, that would not be enough, and would be a clear loss for the candidate, but because there was heavy vote splitting, especially among the two main opposition candidates from Rosa and MDV, no other candidate managed to get more votes than the PDP candidate, who took the election."

The FPTP system is a fairly effective way of quickly determining a winner, but it does not always accurately reflect the will of the entire electorate as we see here. "It was not counted as a discrepancy, though, because institutional rules say FPTP, and so Mr. Salles de Freitas won by following the rules of the system. If voters do not like this, they should ask their government to change it, but the rules of the system were clear to all going in, and by the rules an obvious winner was determined."

Another discrepancy noted was that there were not always adequate protections against electioneering at the polls. "We have no evidence that the government either directly or indirectly influenced the choices of the voters one way or another during the election process, which suggests that there was not interference to produce a specific outcome," said Pontin. "However, in more than 42 sample constituencies, there was some fairly extreme electioneering, to include pamphletting while people were in line, verbal and physical altercations between passionate members of competing parties, people wearing shirts and buttons supporting their chosen candidates and getting yelled at by other voters, and candidates placing signs and even in some cases, turning up to the polling site to attempt to persuade voters to cast votes for them. The issue is, of course, that under the current system, this activity is not considered illegal. Unethical perhaps, but not against the law. It may have had a chilling effect on some people's votes, who may have been concerned that somehow that influence would affect the outcome."

Some suggestions Pontin offered for the future are to consider ways to make legislative outcomes even more reflective of the will of the voter. "It may require some constitutional reforms to make the system more of a proportional representation system, to allow voters to not feel like they have to engage in strategic voting. Currently there is no way constitutionally to even redistrict. As populations shift in the country, that in and of itself will become a problem. Sooner or later, if the Government is interested in maintaining legitimacy, they will obviously want to consider some constitutional reforms to try to address these two situations."

Additional reforms could be simple statutory limitations on election place campaigning. "Allowing people to vote in peace tends to encourage more people to be willing to show up to the polls and stand in line to wait to vote," said Pontin. "Simple policy changes that do not permit signs and campaign materials at polling sites will encourage a culture of the expectation of privacy. Once people become inured to expect that their votes will be private and more importantly inviolable, the more they themselves will insist on that. This one change alone can help engender support for democratic institutionalization that can deepen democratization in the country. It will promote a virtuous cycle in the country." Campaign finance reform is also another policy change, but at the end of the day, money can only go so far during elections. "The best system, in our opinion would have publicly financed elections. But in fact few democratic systems have robust public funding, and that alone would not invalidate an election from being considered fair and legitimate."

While these discrepancies will certainly be addressed in time, Pontin said that the team got the sense that the Government was committed to free, fair and clean elections going forward. "We feel confident that elections were well run, the process was transparent and there were strong guardrails in place against abuse, most especially from the Government, from Party organizations and from political elites interested in ensuring outcomes different from what the voters wanted. We applaud the People of Tukarali for taking these steps to deepen their transition away from authoritarian rule to democracy."

The full report, which contained about 650 pages of raw summary data in support of the findings of the Monitor Group.

@TheRepublic