Understanding the issues of electoral reform is very important because it sets the rules of the political game. But just like with anything else there is a minimum investment of energy and time required to figure them out. That can be more difficult than it should have been when you have a biased media putting intellectually dishonest politicians with a giant skills-mismatch like Sithanen on a pedestal. It doesn't help either that the Labour Party is currently in the darkest phase of its history.
So the above table will be quite handy to bring a maximum of voters up to speed with the three principal options. Both the Sithanen (RS/NR/PB) and the Pravind Jugnauth proposals would have increased the number of additional MPs we had over the last eleven general elections by over one hundred – the actual numbers would be between 124 and 168. They would also have made government formation a lot more difficult and led to unstable governments and to more governments with much shorter durations – you can bet we would have ended up with a lot more than 11 of them. These proposals would basically turn the plutocracy we're in into an autocracy afflicted with a perpetual political crisis.
The last proposal is one which I've worked on for the past eight years with most of the interesting work done in the past four. It starts with our current system and makes use of the important insight that the problem of large imbalances between vote share and number of MPs in the FPTP system can be recast as one of an opposition that's below a minimum size. Which is why unlike PR-based systems it allocates additional seats only to candidates that are not in the winning alliance and only when there's not enough MPs in the opposition. It also recommends three tools to deepen our democracy. Find out more about these and its other features.
