THE PEEPER WAS WRONG!

May 23, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The letter writer who in Thursday’s edition of the Kaieteur News pointed out that even if the PPP had secured the two additional votes to win Region Eight in the General Elections, this would not have allowed it to gain a majority in the National Assembly. The writer is correct in his assertion.
The Peeper concedes this point, apologizes to my readers for an incorrect deduction, and thanks the letter writer for pointing out the mistake. There was no malice or mischief intended.
In strict mathematics if you have one hundred balls and you have to divide it equally among four children, you can simply divide the total number of balls (100) by the total number of children (4) to arrive at how many balls (25) each child would receive. Or you can try a convoluted method of dividing the total number of balls into two groupings of fifty and assigning the four children to two groups of two each. Then each group of two children will share fifty balls, giving you the same total of twenty-five.
Now suppose there are ten Regions in the country and the votes in the entire country comprised the combined votes of each region, and if there are sixty-five seats to be contested, and further supposing that twenty-five seats are for geographic constituencies and for what is called the national top up seats. One way of determining who gets how many seats is to assume that that forty seats will be determined by the overall vote and twenty-five by the regional vote.
Unfortunately this is not what Guyana’s electoral laws dictate as was correctly pointed it. How it is done is that the total sixty-five seats are proportioned based on the respective total votes received by each competing parties.
The regional constituencies are determined before and then factored into this distribution. This would mean, as was correctly pointed out by the letter writer, that in a primarily two-horse field, once a party gains a majority it will most definitely gain a majority of the seats.
What the Peeper’s calculation mistakenly did, was to assume that the twenty-five geographic seats are first determined from the votes in each Region and then the remaining forty seats are distributed in relation to the overall votes cast in all region combined.
This is not how it works even though some will contend this is how it should work. In other words, what may be examined for the future is a system that allows the geographic constituencies to directly vote for twenty-five seats with the number of geographic seats in each region being determined by the number of voters in the respective regions. The remaining forty seats should be competed for by virtue of the proportion of the overall vote that each party gets.
It seems a bit lopsided that a party which won the most geographic constituencies and lost the overall votes by a margin of under 5000 votes, would end up as a minority in the national assembly when the presidency can be determined by a plurality. But do not tell that to the winner, or for that matter, the losers.

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THE PEEPER WAS WRONG!

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