The messy electoral reforms

Justice Minister Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe has on October 26 requested Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena to appoint a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to recommend reforms in all three tiers of elections in the country, Parliamentary, provincial councils and local government. 

The Minister seems to have made this request in line with a recent statement made by President Ranil Wickremesinghe. The President during a meeting with a group of professionals at the Presidential Secretariat on October 9 said, a referendum should be held to decide the Parliamentary electoral system unless the Parliamentary Select Committee which is to be appointed soon fails to do so by July next year. 

Mr. Wickremesinghe himself suggested during the meeting several changes. He said that the number of members in local government bodies should be brought down from the current 8700 to 4000, and the preferential voting system should be done away with, while imposing limitations on the election expenses by political parties and candidates.

The Opposition parties which are skeptical about the professed intention of the reforms accuse that the government is finding a ruse to defer elections, as it is highly unpopular in the light of current economic crisis. They question as to how the government is going to hold a referendum while declining a request by the Opposition parties to hold a Parliamentary election citing financial difficulties.  

Sri Lanka since its Independence is struggling to find an electoral system appropriate to the country electing PSCs time and again. While countries like India and Pakistan still maintain the Fists-Past-the-Post (FPP) system inherited from the colonial British administration, Sri Lanka replaced it with the Proportional Representation (PR) when it introduced the second Republican Constitution in 1978. 

A serious problem of FPP system is that sometimes the final seat allocation is not proportional to the votes cast, because the winning party gets the seat, irrespective of how many votes it gets from each electorate. In fact, it was the 1970 General election that really prompted the UNP government to discard the FPP system at the first opportunity, as the SLFP-led coalition won two thirds of seats, despite UNP having obtained more votes.
However, after putting the PR system in practice for more than two decades, the country was fed up with it as well at the turn of the new millennium, mainly on the ground that some former electorates failed to secure representatives from any party. The system was made more complicated and prone to corruption with the introduction of preferential votes by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in May 1988. The proportionality in election was disturbed by the introduction of the national list under the same Amendment. 

Thus, a PSC was appointed in 2003 under the chairmanship of Dinesh Gunawardena, the leader of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna to recommend reforms to the electoral system. A mixed system of FPP and PR systems was agreed upon by almost all political parties in the Parliament of the day through this process which was dragged on for about a decade. It took nine years to change the law at least for the local government bodies since the appointment of the PSC and 15 years to hold the first election under the mixed electoral system agreed upon at the deliberation of it.  The mixed electoral system so implemented at the 2018 local government election turned out to be an utter mess, and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the leader of the winning party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) wanted the system changed again. The winning party in many LG bodies could not appoint mayors for urban councils and Chairmen for Pradeshiya Sabhas for want of absolute majority. 
In the meantime the mixed electoral system had been introduced for the provincial council elections as well by the Yahapalana government in 2017. The controversial manner in which it was adopted apart - five years on - the delimitation report for the PC elections has failed to see the light of the day yet. 

Following a resolution passed by Parliament on April 5, 2021 another PSC was appointed to identify electoral reforms again under the chairmanship of minister Dinesh Gunawardena and the final report of it was presented in Parliament on June 22 this year amidst a chaotic situation in the country. The report recommended the mixed electoral system in general again while suggesting the PR system for the PC elections as a way out of the current mess. It is against this backdrop, Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe has requested the Speaker to appoint another PSC, for the same purpose.  Sri Lanka’s problem with regard to electoral reform is that interests of political parties in power take precedence over that of the country, during reform processes. And sometimes these processes are initiated untimely and with ulterior motives. Thus thousands of man hours and millions of rupees have gone down the drain in the name of reforms for the past two decades alone. It would be prudent hence to pass the responsibility to the experts in the field who can work on it without any conflict of interests.