Our Constituencies Should Be Unpaired Back

To how they were in 1959 and 1963. That is 40 single-member constituencies (SMC) for Mauritius – we should add two for Rodrigues. It's ok for now that some are much larger than others. That's not a national priority. What is is to have very competitive elections in every riding and move away from such nonsense as "si zot anvi minis vot 3-0" and God knows what. We've seen how interesting the last by-election in no. 18 was. Plenty of good debates and surprising results. Let's face it, voters are becoming smarter every day. For example I was surprised to see that many people now fully understand that the flat tax had already caused a gigantic shortfall – a toohrooh of more than a trillion rupees at the end of last year. This is very promising for the quality of our debates.

Given that voters look set to connect a lot more dots – two are more casinos in city-centres = more drugs in school and elsewhere – the Electoral Boundaries Commission should do the spadework to allow a reversion to our setup of SMCs because they're coming back. Sooner than we think. The other big advantage of having 40-odd SMCs is that they would enable same-day results – with a likely winner announced on national TV around 8pm – as there would be three times less votes to count. This would cut the overall cost of a general election substantially.