7.12 Accreditation of the members of the SEOM as election observers on a nondiscriminatory basis; 7.13 Allow the members of the SEOM to communicate freely with all competing political parties, candidates, other political associations and organisations, and civil society organizations; 7.14 Allow the members of the SEOM to communicate freely with voters except when the electoral law reasonably prescribes such communication in order to protect the secrecy of the vote; 7.15 Allow the members of the SEOM an unhindered access to and communicate freely with the media; 7.16 Allow the members of the SEOM to communicate with and have unimpeded access to the National Election Commission or appropriate electoral authority and all other election administrators; 7.17 Allow the members of the SEOM free access to all legislation and regulations governing the electoral process and environment; 7.18 Allow the members of the SEOM free access to all electoral registers or voters’ list; 7.19 Ensure that the members of the SEOM have an unimpeded and unrestricted access to all polling stations and counting centres. In addition to these principles, the SADC Parliamentary Forum has issued detailed guidelines which they use when they observe elections. Appendix B. The Problems with the Proportional Distribution Formula The Law The Election Code was amended by the presidential powers on 12 June 2013 to cover the changes made to the electoral system by the new Constitution. The details of the List Proportional (List PR) element of the law were included in the amendment. List PR is to be used at province level for three elections: • T  he women’s race for the National Assembly for the first two elections, six from each province, • The List PR members of the Senate, six from each province, • T  he ten List PR members of the provincial councils, other than for the metropolitan ones. The votes cast for the first-past-the-post (FPTP) in the National Assembly are counted for all the three races. The Distribution Formula The law prescribes the method of largest remainder with Hare’s quota (LR) as the mathematical method of transforming the votes to seats. No threshold is included. LR is a quite common system, but it has some unfortunate side effects which are often underestimated. The side effects include: i) Unreasonably small parties may win a seat if there is no threshold defined in the law. ii) Variations to a party’s votes may affect the distribution of votes between other parties (lack of consistency) or an increase in the total number of seats may lead to fewer seats for a party (the Alabama paradox). Both these side effects did materialise in the 2013 elections in Zimbabwe. These disadvantages are imbedded in the method of largest remainder, regardless of the quota used (such as Hare or Droop). The other class of distribution methods commonly used are the division methods, with Sainte-Laguë and d’Hondt being the most common. This group of methods do not have the side effects mentioned and are therefore more robust. SainteLaguë is neutral in its distribution, whereas d’Hondt favours large parties. In the following we compare LR with the Sainte-Laguë method on the Zimbabwe 2013 election results. 60 61