Thursday, January 26, 2006



Palestine votes

Palestinians have been voting today to elect a new Parliament for the first time in ten years. Turnout has been high - about 73% - and the poll has passed peacefully. Observers have called it "an example to the Arab world".

The last Palestinian legislative elections used multimember constituencies in the same way that many New Zealand local bodies do. This time round, they've combined that with a proportional system, resulting in what we would call "supplementary member": half the seats are assigned proportionately from a party vote, and half are elected in multi-member electorates as before. But there's no overall proportionality, and the non-preferential multi-member electorates allows those with a simple plurality to gain disproportionate power (even more so than they would under single-member electorates).

Full results won't be known for two weeks.

1 comments:

And I hear that the US administration has already announced that they won't work with the prospective new government of Palestine.

It would seem the democratic process is only legitimate if the citizens of a country choose someone meeting with the West's approval.

Conditional Democracy. An interesting concept...

Posted by Anonymous : 1/26/2006 05:40:00 PM