Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
Reforming our voting system is a difficult task
1) In a well-established democracy, the voting system is enshrined in law and not in customs. To change this law, we need elected politicians. But these are necessarily in conflict of interest since the conditions of their political future are at stake. The first thing we would expect from them is that they declare this situation which does not make them the best people to decide on the matter. It will then be easier for them to tackle other difficulties with humility and distance.
2) The choice of a new voting system contains a number of theoretical and practical difficulties, certainly of great intellectual interest, but which can easily discourage well-meaning people who are unaccustomed to all these nuances. These difficulties are not insurmountable, but they require that we do not seek to confuse the population unnecessarily with secondary considerations or perfectly convoluted solutions.
3) A compromise must be made between the most equitable representation possible and the formation of governments stable enough to carry out a political program that their citizens will recognize and on which they can make a judgment when the time comes. This compromise is only possible if the partisans of the purest proportionality put a little water in their wine just like those who believe that apart from a majority government, there is no salvation.
However, this reform remains inevitable.
A) Polls indicate that the population endorses the principle of fair representation of political choices within Parliament and that it fears coalition governments less than our elected officials. However, he is sorely lacking the level of information that can enable him to assess the possible solutions. Other societies with populations no more educated than ours have succeeded in this change and their citizens do not complain about it.
B) Solutions exist to help the political class in the task of choosing a better voting system. It can be a committee of “wise men”, experts or, as I prefer, a deliberative assembly of citizens. We can also hope that the political parties will agree among themselves, but we risk having to wait a long time and the result of the compromise that they will achieve will inevitably be marked by the seal of the balance of power that they will succeed in establishing. It’s in the nature of things. There is no point in blaming them for it, because it is we who put them in competition for the exercise of power.
C) It took a long time to arrive at the universality of the right to vote, it will also take time for the equality of this first democratic stage to be reflected in a second: that of an equal weight of influence for each citizen in the formation of a Parliament. This second requirement of equality is not at all acquired with our voting system, because too many votes are not considered for perfectly contingent reasons from the moral point of view, in particular the place where a voter is registered.
The practical obstacles may well be real, and I do not underestimate any of them, I do not see any arguments that could block in the long term the request for a more egalitarian ballot than ours, a ballot created in a distant era, let us recall -le, where political equality was the least of the worries.