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New votes-to-seats system makes elections ‘fairer’

Indonesia will use a different system to convert votes to legislative seats in the 2019 general election, a move that is expected to more accurately reflect electoral preferences in the legislative

Karina M. Tehusijarana (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, May 28, 2018

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New votes-to-seats system makes elections ‘fairer’

Indonesia will use a different system to convert votes to legislative seats in the 2019 general election, a move that is expected to more accurately reflect electoral preferences in the legislative. Smaller parties, however, have voiced concern over potentially losing seats next year once the new method takes effect.

Since its first general election, held in 1955, Indonesia has used the Hare quota method, devised by British political scientist Sir Thomas Hare, to convert the number of votes a party receives in each electoral district to the number of seats it gets at the House of Representatives.

In 2017, the House passed a new General Elections Law that, among other things, changes the votes-to-seats conversion to the Sainte-Laguë method, named after French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë, who proposed the method in 1910.

With the Hare quota, the number of valid votes cast in an electoral district is divided by the number of seats contested in the district to determine the “price” of each seat.

For example, during the 2014 legislative elections, 1,997,353 valid votes were cast in Central Java’s fifth electoral district, which carries eight House seats. By applying the Hare quota, the “price” of each seat was 249,669 votes. Only the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the Golkar Party received enough votes to meet the seat price.

With 861,673 votes, the PDIP could “afford” three seats and still have 112,666 votes left over. Golkar, on the other hand, could afford only one seat and have 19,777 votes left over.

The remaining four seats were allocated to the four parties with the four largest number of votes left over, namely: the Gerindra Party, the National Mandate Party (PAN), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).

With the Sainte-Laguë method, however, seats are allocated by dividing the total number of valid votes each party receives by odd numbers (1, 3, 5, 7 and so on) and then taking the largest result of that division according to the number of seats in the electoral district.

Using Central Java’s fifth electoral district as an example again, the Sainte-Laguë method would result in the PDI-P obtaining four seats and Golkar, the PKB, Gerindra and the PAN each obtaining one seat, leaving the PKS empty-handed.

Had the Sainte-Laguë method been applied in every electoral district during the 2014 legislative election, the PDI-P, the Democratic Party, the PPP and the Hanura Party would each have one additional seat, while Golkar would gain four.

Conversely, the PKS and Gerindra would each lose two seats, while the PKB would lose one and the PAN would lose three.

When the House deliberated on the 2017 General Elections Law, the leaders of several smaller parties expressed strong objections to the Sainte-Laguë method, saying it favored larger parties.

“We will vote for anything other than Sainte-Laguë,” PAN secretary-general Yandri Susanto said at the time.

Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) executive director Titi Anggraini, however, told The Jakarta Post that the new method could not be said to favor any particular party over others.

“One of the principles of our electoral system is proportionality, so if a party receives 10 percent of the vote, it should also get 10 percent of the seats,” she said, emphasizing that “the Sainte-Laguë method is more proportional.”

She said that, although it was true that some smaller parties might be disadvantaged by the new method, the same was true for some larger parties.

Gerindra, for example, would lose two seats, but the proportion of seats it would get (12.68 percent) was closer to the share of the vote it received (12.10 percent) when compared to the Hare quota (13.04 percent).

Conversely, Hanura, which only captured 2.86 percent of House seats despite receiving 5.39 percent of the vote, would gain an additional seat, increasing its representation at the House to 3.04 percent.

PAN lawmaker and former elections bill special committee member Viva Yoga Mauladi acknowledged that the Sainte-Laguë method was “fairer” and “more proportional.”

“Since it is now law, the PAN will prepare [its] seat targets in each district more carefully,” he said. “Although it’s different from the Hare quota, the difference is not that significant.”

General Elections Commission (KPU) member Pramono Ubaid said the change would not affect the KPU’s workflow.

“We have already created an IT system that automatically converts the vote totals from each electoral district to the number of seats,” he said.

Viva said parties should end the debate over the vote conversion and subsequent revisions to the law should leave most of the substantial matters alone.

“Let the election system work as it is currently designed,” he said. “Revisions should only be made after three or four elections, not right before every election, as is the case now.”

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