MMA 'challenges fairness of elections'

THAILAND has been introduced to a new electoral system proposal that could see changes in the proportions of constituency candidates and party-list ones. The aim of the so-called Mixed Members Apportionment (MMA) system was to make every vote meaningful.
One adviser to the Constitution Drafting Commission (CDC) has invited people to take a close look at its pros and cons, before judging it with early simulations. He said it was not fair to use outdated results in the new proposal – the vote counting systems were different and voters’ behaviour might also change.


After the new MMA electoral system was proposed last week, concerns have arisen, including the point whether big parties would gain fewer seats as a result of it.
Several political experts have tried simulating the numbers of the elections in 2005 and 2011 with the new MMA system to see how well each party could do under it.
The 2005 election was a landslide victory for the Thaksin Shinawatra-led Thai Rak Thai (TRT), and the latter was won by the TRT’s off-spring, Pheu Thai.
It has turned out that TRT and its off-shoots, as well as some big parties including the Democrats, would have gained fewer seats under the MMA system, while the medium and small parties would benefit considerably from the increasing numbers of total MPs.
Consequently, people are concerned that such a new political landscape would lead to the formation of a coalition government considered as weak, unstable, and worse still, dysfunctional.
However, CDC adviser Jade Donavanik has noted that such a reduction of big parties from the simulation might not be correct.
Jade said it was not fair as it had used the numbers obtained in the past to explain something in the future.
“What happens in the future should be left to voters who come to vote,” Jade pointed out, explaining that the way people vote will change when the system does.
The simulations have been calculated based on different logic and systems, he said. They have used an assumption of one system to explain another system; so, it wasn’t totally logical, Jade added.
“You can’t say that had we used this system in 2005 this would have been the result. It’s an ‘if clause’ that is not true and can never be true,” he said.
The CDC has emphasised that with the MMA, every vote would be counted and not go in vain. It was an apportionment because it was semi-proportional, Jade said. People had one ballot paper to vote for a candidate and when he didn’t win, the votes would be counted towards the party list later.
Jade said it was fair in a sense that the winning party would have already won seats in the constituencies. They would be proportional to the list, he said, adding that it could be called compensation to the losing votes. In short, no votes would be discarded.
Besides that, the one-ballot system also had an advantage over the two-ballot ones because a voter had to decide only on one vote, which was easy and directed to his or her favourite candidate and party.
However, Jade didn’t claim the system was absolutely perfect.
He said the proportionality was a thing to be considered, especially how much proportionality between constituency and party list candidates the MMA would produce, compared with the MMP which was considered “the fairest”.
“The proportionality of the MMA could be around 50-60 per cent when the MMP was 90-95 percent. There are also some questions that followed, such as which parties the rest of the percentage should go to, and whether or not they would truly represent their popularity,” Jade observed.
Another possible weakness of the new system was possible complications in the vote counting, as people might get confused when votes of losing candidates were counted for the second time for a party list seat, while a winning constituency candidate’s votes would be counted only once, he said.
Another possible question could also be whether or not the voting reflected the true popularity of
political parties as people voted for their candidates, not parties like the MMP.
Lastly, the CDC adviser said the MMA was newly designed and nothing like it existed anywhere in the world.
“So, would it be a problem if we were to adopt this system considered suitable for Thailand,
but no countries have used it?”
Jade said, adding people might have questions about it being unprecedented.