BALLOT News X Issue No. 2 From page 23 politics can be traced back to the liberation struggle and the Matabeleland massacres during the first few years of the 1980s. After some form of thawing during the 1990s, the bitterness mood resurfaced in bludgeoning proportions after the militarisation of Zimbabwean politics when the war veterans entered the political fray after the 2000 referendum. The general mood of bitterness created political polarisation, suspicion and intolerance that has made it impossible even for well-meaning religious groups and neighbouring countries to negotiate a compromise political solution. It is our submission that, given the mood of bitterness that has engulfed our political climate, there is need for an electoral system that is capable of healing the political polarisation that we find in our society today. Among all the systems available, Majority Plurality Systems (MPS), Proportional Representation (PR) and Semi Proportional Systems (SPS), it is PR that can perform the task of healing political wounds with resounding success. We tried it in 1980 and it worked. With a bit of dexterity amassed from experience, the PR system can be merged with the current electoral system to come up with a system that can harness the advantages of both while systematically diminishing the disadvantages associated with the two electoral systems. The basic approach of proportional representation is simple: legislators are elected in multimember districts instead of single-member districts, and the number of seats that a party wins in an election is proportional to the amount of its support among voters. So if you have a 10-member district and Party A wins 50% of the vote, it gets five of the ten seats. If Party B wins 30% of the vote, it gets three seats; and if a third party gets 20% of the vote, they win two seats. Electoral system designers have devised several ways to achieve these proportional results, and so there are three basic kinds of PR: the party list, mixedmember, and single-transferable vote (also called choice voting). X September 2007 While PR has its own disadvantages like reducing the personal accountability of parliamentary representatives to their constituents and encouraging the executive to adopt an authoritarian predisposition in its relationship with the legislature, its advantages outweigh, by far, the noted disadvantages. Where it has been used, PR has managed, as in the case of South Africa, to promote regional balances, racial diversity and gender representation in parliament. This has ensured racial reconciliation, thawing of political tension and animosity and created a political environment conducive for empowering women politically. PR systems, as a starting point, were devised to solve the many problems caused by plurality-majority voting systems especially that of creating bitter losers and intolerant winners. As a rule, PR voting systems provide more accurate representation of parties, better representation for political and racial minorities, fewer wasted votes, higher levels of voter turnout, better representation of women, greater likelihood of majority rule, and little opportunity for gerrymandering. Unlike the First Past the Post system, which is the commonest systems used in MajorityPlurality Systems and the one we use in Zimbabwe, where the winner takes everything, proportional representation does provide a window through which losers can still participate in governance issues. Where PR is used, losing in an election does not necessarily translate to failure to participate in governance as all participating parties who would have garnered votes, albeit in a losing cause, will still get solace from the fact that they would get seats in the legislative assembly. We have had problems where, just because a party wants to win the majority seats in the current electoral system, constituency boundaries have been drawn to the advantage of the incumbent. One advantage of proportional representation is that it would greatly reduce or eliminate the problem of partisan gerrymandering -- one of the scourges of the single-member district system. Currently, constituency boundaries are usually drawn to create district majorities that favour certain parties or incumbents -- a cynical exercise designed to cheat some parties out of their fair share of seats. This is true when one looks at the Harare South constituency where peri-urban and rural districts were incorporated into the new boundaries to dilute the Movement for Democratic Change urban vote. However, as mentioned earlier, how constituency boundaries are drawn in PR systems usually has no significant impact on representation. If the multi-member PR districts are sufficiently large (five or more seats), it does not matter whether a party is a majority or a minority -- all parties receive their fair share of seats. 24 What Zimbabwe needs now, is not an electoral system that creates bitter losers. We need a process that enables all parties in an election to work towards the political and economic turn-around of the country. This can only be achieved if all players in the political juggernaut, majority party, minority parties, men, women, blacks and whites could be allowed to participate in governance issues. We experimented with PR just after the liberation struggle and the system worked wonders as we managed to effectively implement a reconciliation process that became the envy of the world. Since political tension is high and bitter political rivalry abounds, it is time we go back to where the rain started beating us and map out a survival strategy that would work us out of the political and economic quagmire that we find ourselves immersed in. It is not a bad idea to re-think systems that have worked for us before and if it means going back to 1980 and modify the electoral system a bit, so be it