Fatah calls for proportional voting in Palestine

June 22nd, 2007
Jack

Jack Santucci was FairVote staff from 2005-07.

I’ve been waiting for this.

Bethlehem - Ma’an - The Palestine Liberation Organisation central council closed its meetings on Thursday evening, calling for amendments to the election laws. In particular, the council called for the establishment of a proportional electoral system rather than a district-based system.

Palestine’s winner-take-all, at-large election system misfired in January 2006, creating a Hamas-dominated government.

Ryan Griffin, then a research fellow here, and I co-wrote an analysis of that election, which a DailyKos reader picked up last Friday as political violence again made news in Palestine.

Fatah was over-nominating in the multi-member districts used at the nominal tier. A preferential system like choice voting could preserve the candidate orientation of the electoral system while dealing with spoiler effects like these. For now, though, it seems like list PR is the order of the day.

My future colleagues at the Democratic Piece have been following developments in the area. Fruits and Votes has a great piece on the initial election, and New America’s Steven Hill ran a widely syndicated op-ed on the result in February 2006.

A big thanks to Program for Representative Government intern Meghan Jones for her close watching of Google alerts.

Other posts by Jack

Posted in Proportional Voting | Tags: , |

4 Responses to “Fatah calls for proportional voting in Palestine”

  1. 1 MSS
    June 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    I have a small disagreement with the conclusions Jack draws. He suggests that Fatah’s substantial underrepresentation was a result of over-nominating, that is, having too many candidates for its votes to support. That would be a valid conclusion were the nominal tier elected by SNTV or limited vote, or if voters for the largest party had not been so party-oriented. But if in most districts, Hamas had the plurality of voters, who were generally willing to give all their votes to Hamas candidates, then a different nomination strategy could hardly have made a significant difference in the the outcome. The problem was the electoral system itself, and not nomination strategy.

    Oh, and overnomination can indeed be a problem with STV (”choice voting,” if you must).

  2. 2 Jack
    June 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

    Matthew, let me know what you think of this. It’s from the analysis Griffin and I did some time ago (I was much greener at the time):

    Three other likely spoiler cases show evidence of over-nomination by Fatah in winner-take-all plurality seats. In these elections, Fatah won significant percentages of the vote, but these votes were divided among more candidates than votes for Hamas were.

    • In Nablus, Hamas ran five candidates, and Fatah ran six. Hamas won five of six seats with 38.2%. Fatah won only one, despite polling 36.5% - only 2% less than the opponent.

    • The outcome in Ramallah was similar. Hamas ran four candidates where Fatah ran five. Hamas polled 38.4%, and Fatah polled 32.6%. Yet Hamas won four of five seats, and Fatah won only one.

    • In Gaza, Hamas won five of eight seats with 37.3%. Fatah won no seats despite polling 31.7%. Hamas ran five candidates where Fatah ran eight.

  3. 3 Fruits and Votes » Prof. Shugart's Blog » Fatah now wants PR
    June 22nd, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    [...] Thanks to the folks at Fair Vote for noticing Fatah’s expression of support for PR. I have a small disagreement with Jack’s conclusions in the just-linked post, however. He suggests that Fatah’s substantial underrepresentation was a result of over-nominating, that is, having too many candidates for its votes to support. That would be a valid conclusion were the nominal tier elected by SNTV or limited vote, or if voters for the largest party had not been so party-oriented. But given that in most districts, Hamas had the plurality of voters, who were generally willing to give all their votes to Hamas candidates, a different nomination strategy could hardly have made a significant difference in the outcome. The problem was the electoral system itself, and not nomination strategy. Propagation: [...]

  4. 4 MSS
    June 28th, 2007 at 8:17 pm

    Well, regarding the excerpt in comment #2, I would again say: If a plurality of voters favored Hamas in any given district, and gave their votes to all of Hamas’s candidates, it does not matter if Fatah nominates one. It still won’t elect anyone. It is not as if their voters can cumulate on one candidate (or a few).

    I do not doubt that there are some districts where Fatah might have won a seat or two with fewer candidates, because of course nowhere did Hamas voters vote the full slate 100%. I have never looked deeply at individual districts, so I can’t say for sure just how many potential pick-ups Fatah might have had with better nomination. More than zero, for sure. But that must be less important than the fact that the system rewarded a party that had a plurality and disciplined voters (by which I mean the greater tendency to vote for all the party’s nominees). In most districts that meant Hamas. (On the disciplined voters, Fatah lost some seats even in districts where it had the plurality, because its voters were less likely to vote the full party slate. Again, however, that’s not a problem with optimizing the number of nominations; it is a problem with getting voters to vote fully.)

    I have been meaning to research this systematically. It would be a terrific research note, if someone in the profession has not already beaten me to it.

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