2 - A GLOBAL SNAPSHOT (Trường)

A GLOBAL SNAPSHOT

Richard W. Soudriette and Andrew Ellis

Richard W. Soudriette has been president of IFES (established as the International Foundation for Election Systems) since 1988. The author of numerous articles, he is currently coauthoring a book on the impor-tance of election management in advancing democracy. Andrew Ellis, head of the Electoral Processes Team at International IDEA in Stockholm, is coauthor of Electoral System Design: The New Interna-tional IDEA Handbook. He has previously worked for the National Democratic Institute and the European Commission. This essay origi-nally appeared in the April 2006 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

Today the voting booth has become the internationally accepted in-strument of political change. In 1974, there were only 39 electoral democracies—that is, countries where multiparty national elections took place on a regular basis. By 2006, there were at least 120 countries that could be regarded as electoral democracies in one form or another.

Designing an electoral system is an easily identifiable, fundamental step in building a sustainable democracy. When thinking about elec-toral-system design, it is imperative to consider a country’s historical, cultural, and sociological traditions and characteristics. Systems that work well in one country at one time may not do so in another country or even in the same country at another time. Developing countries that inherited the electoral model of their colonial masters, sometimes with-out debate, may not have the electoral systems that best serve their needs.

Elections are not an element of the democratic process that can be considered in isolation. The effective functioning of electoral systems is linked to political-party systems, constitutional development, the provisions governing legislative bodies, and other institutional-frame-work issues. The success of any system also requires its free acceptance as legitimate by the people themselves. There is a diverse array of sys-tems in practice around the world, and sorting through the advantages

Richard W. Soudriette and Andrew Ellis

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and disadvantages of each is no easy task. A very useful guide to the world’s electoral systems is Electoral System Design: The New Interna-tional IDEA Handbook,1 upon which we draw freely in the pages that follow.

The World of Electoral Systems

As Table 1 on the following pages indicates, the electoral systems used to choose national legislatures are plentiful and diverse. For more than half a century, such noted scholars as Maurice Duverger, Giovanni Sartori, Arend Lijphart, Donald Horowitz, Andrew Reynolds, and Ben-jamin Reilly have wrestled with the topic of electoral systems and their impact on democracy. Building on their work and that of others, we can classify electoral systems into four broad categories.

Plurality/majority. Candidates are elected on the basis of a plurality or majority of votes, usually in single-member districts (which are rep-resented in the legislative body by only a single representative). There are five major types within this category: First Past the Post (FPTP), the Two-Round System (TRS), the Alternative Vote (AV), the Block Vote (BV), and the Party-Block Vote (PBV). FPTP is the most widely used of these systems, followed by TRS. Almost all countries that choose presi-dents by direct popular election use either FPTP or TRS for this purpose. There is much greater variation, however, in the systems used to elect national legislatures.

In the FPTP system, practiced in single-member districts, the winner is the candidate who receives more votes than anyone else, even if it is less than a majority. The Two-Round System, as the name implies, re-quires a second round of voting if no candidate in the first round wins a certain set percentage, usually an absolute majority (50 percent + 1 vote). Depending on the type of TRS, two or more of the leading candi-dates in the first round may contest the second round; if more than two candidates are allowed to enter the second round, the winner is the candidate with the most votes, even if less than an absolute majority.

The AV system, usually practiced in single-member districts, is a “preferential” voting system in which voters rank candidates in order according to their preference. A candidate who wins an absolute major-ity of first preferences wins the seat; if no candidate wins an absolute majority of first preferences, then the candidates who received the few-est number of first preferences are eliminated, and their votes are redistributed among the remaining candidates until one achieves an absolute majority.

The BV system, used in multimember districts (which are represented in a legislative body by more than one representative), gives electors as many votes as there are seats to be filled in their district, and candidates with the highest vote totals win. In the PBV system, also used in

18				A Global Snapshot
TABLE 1—THE ELECTORAL SYSTEMS OF INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES
COUNTRY	NATIONAL	PRESIDENT	COUNTRY	NATIONAL	PRESIDENT
	LEGISLATURE			LEGISLATURE
Afghanistan	Other (SNTV)	TRS	Equatorial Guinea	PR (List)	FPTP
Albania	Mixed (MMP)	—	Eritrea	T	T
Algeria	PR (List)	TRS	Estonia	PR (List)	—
Andorra	Mixed (PS)	—	Ethiopia	P/M (FPTP)	—
Angola	PR (List)	TRS	Fiji	P/M (AV)	—
Antigua & Barbuda	P/M (FPTP)	—	Finland	PR (List)	TRS
Argentina	PR (List)	TRS	France	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Armenia	Mixed (PS)	TRS	Gabon	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Australia	P/M (AV)	—	The Gambia	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Austria	PR (List)	TRS	Georgia	Mixed (PS)	TRS
Azerbaijan	Mixed (PS)	TRS	Germany	Mixed (MMP)	—
Bahamas	P/M (FPTP)	—	Ghana	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Bahrain	P/M (TRS)	—	Greece	PR (List)	—
Bangladesh	P/M (FPTP)	—	Grenada	P/M (FPTP)	—
Barbados	P/M (FPTP)	—	Guatemala	PR (List)	TRS
Belarus	P/M (TRS)	TRS	Guinea	Mixed (PS)	TRS
Belgium	PR (List)	—	Guinea-Bissau	PR (List)	TRS
Belize	P/M (FPTP)	—	Guyana	PR (List)	FPTP
Benin	PR (List)	TRS	Haiti	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Bhutan	N	—	Honduras	PR (List)	FPTP
Bolivia	Mixed (MMP)	TRS	Hungary	Mixed (MMP)	—
Bosnia-Herzegovina	PR (List)	FPTP	Iceland	PR (List)	FPTP
Botswana	P/M (FPTP)	—	India	P/M (FPTP)	—
Brazil	PR (List)	TRS	Indonesia	PR (List)	TRS
Brunei	N	—	Iran	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Bulgaria	PR (List)	TRS	Iraq	PR (List)	—
Burkina Faso	PR (List)	TRS	Ireland	PR (STV)	AV
Burma	P/M (FPTP)	—	Israel	PR (List)	—
Burundi	PR (List)	—	Italy	Mixed (MMP)	—
Cambodia	PR (List)	—	Jamaica	P/M (FPTP)	—
Cameroon	P/M & PR	FPTP	Japan	Mixed (PS)	—
Canada	P/M (FPTP)	—	Jordan	Other (SNTV)	—
Cape Verde	PR (List)	TRS	Kazakhstan	Mixed (PS)	TRS
Central African Rep.	P/M (TRS)	TRS	Kenya	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Chad	P/M & PR	TRS	Kiribati	P/M (TRS)	FPTP
Chile	PR (List)	TRS	Kuwait	P/M (BV)	—
China	N	—	Kyrgyzstan	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Colombia	PR(List)	TRS	Laos	P/M (BV)	—
Comoros	P/M(TRS)	FPTP	Latvia	PR (List)	—
Congo (Brazzaville)	P/M (TRS)	FPTP	Lebanon	P/M (BV)	—
Congo (Kinshasa)	T	T	Lesotho	Mixed (MMP)	—
Costa Rica	PR (List)	TRS	Liberia	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Côte d’Ivoire	P/M	TRS	Libya	N	—
Croatia	PR (List)	TRS	Liechtenstein	PR (List)	—
Cuba	P/M(TRS)	—	Lithuania	Mixed (PS)	TRS
Cyprus	PR (List)	TRS	Luxembourg	PR (List)	—
Czech Republic	PR (List)	—	Macedonia	PR (List)	TRS
Denmark	PR (List)	—	Madagascar	P/M & PR	TRS
Djibouti	P/M (PBV)	TRS	Malawi	P/M (FPTP)	FPTP
Dominica	P/M(FPTP)	—	Malaysia	P/M (FPTP)	—
Dominican Republic	PR (List)	TRS	Maldives	P/M (BV)	—
East Timor	Mixed (PS)	TRS	Mali	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Ecuador	PR (List)	TRS	Malta	PR (STV)	—
Egypt	P/M (TRS)	—	Marshall Islands	P/M	—
El Salvador	PR (List)	TRS	Mauritania	P/M (TRS)	TRS

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COUNTRY	NATIONAL	PRESIDENT	COUNTRY	NATIONAL	PRESIDENT
	LEGISLATURE			LEGISLATURE
Mauritius	P/M (BV)	—	Sweden	PR (List)	—
Mexico	Mixed (MMP)	FPTP	Switzerland	PR (List)	—
Micronesia	P/M (FPTP)	—	Syria	P/M (BV)	—
Moldova	PR (List)	—	Taiwan	Mixed (PS)	FPTP
Monaco	Mixed (PS)	—	Tajikistan	Mixed (PS)	TRS
Mongolia	P/M (TRS)	TRS	Tanzania	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Morocco	PR (List)	—	Thailand	Mixed (PS)	—
Mozambique	PR (List)	TRS	Togo	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Namibia	PR (List)	TRS	Tonga	P/M (BV)	—
Nauru	Other (MBC)	—	Trinidad & Tobago	P/M (FPTP)	—
Nepal	P/M (FPTP)	—	Tunisia	Mixed (PS)	FPTP
Netherlands	PR (List)	—	Turkey	PR (List)	—
New Zealand	Mixed (MMP)	—	Turkmenistan	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Nicaragua	PR (List)	TRS	Tuvalu	P/M (BV)	—
Niger	P/M & PR	TRS	Uganda	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Nigeria	P/M (FPTP)	TRS	Ukraine	Mixed (PS)	TRS
North Korea	P/M (TRS)	—	United Arab Emirates	N	—
Norway	PR (List)	—	United Kingdom	P/M (FPTP)	—
Oman	P/M (FPTP)	—	United States	P/M (FPTP)	FPTP
Pakistan	Mixed (PS)	—	Uruguay	PR (List)	TRS
Palau	P/M (FPTP)	TRS	Uzbekistan	P/M (TRS)	TRS
Panama	P/M & PR	FPTP	Vanuatu	Other (SNTV)	—
Papua New Guinea	P/M (AV)	—	Venezuela	Mixed (MMP)	FPTP
Paraguay	PR (List)	FPTP	Vietnam	P/M (TRS)	—
Peru	PR (List)	TRS	Yemen	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Philippines	Mixed (PS)	FPTP	Zambia	P/M (FPTP)	FPTP
Poland	PR (List)	TRS	Zimbabwe	P/M (FPTP)	TRS
Portugal	PR (List)	TRS
Qatar	N	—
			P/M–Plurality/Majority
Romania	PR (List)	TRS
Russia	Mixed (PS)	TRS	FPTP–First Past the Post
Rwanda	PR (List)	FPTP	TRS–Two Round System
St. Kitts & Nevis	P/M (FPTP)	—	AV–Alternative Vote
St. Lucia	P/M (FPTP)	—	BV–Block Vote
St. Vincent	P/M (FPTP)	—	PBV–Party Block Vote
Samoa	P/M	—	SV–Supplementary Vote
San Marino	PR (List)	—	PR–Proportional Representation
S~ao Tomé & Príncipe PR (List)		TRS	List–List Proportional Representation
Saudi Arabia	N	—	STV–Single Transferable Vote
Senegal	Mixed (PS)	TRS	Mixed
Serbia & Montenegro	T	T	PS–Parallel System
Seychelles	Mixed (PS)	TRS	MMP–Mixed Member Proportional
Sierra Leone	PR (List)	TRS	Other
Singapore	P/M	FPTP	SNTV–Single Non-Transferable Vote
Slovakia	PR (List)	TRS	LV–Limited Vote
Slovenia	PR (List)	TRS	MBC–Modified Borda Count
Solomon Islands	P/M (FPTP)	—	N–No provisions for direct elections
Somalia	T	T	T–Country in transition (new electoral sys-
South Africa	PR (List)	—	tem not decided at time of publication)
South Korea	Mixed (PS)	FPTP
Spain	PR (List)	—
Sri Lanka	PR (List)	SV	This table is a modified version of a more
Sudan	P/M (FPTP)	TRS	extensive one that appears in Electoral Sys-
Suriname	PR (List)	—	tem Design: The New International IDEA
Swaziland	P/M (FPTP)	—	Handbook (2005).

20 A Global Snapshot

multimember districts, electors vote for party lists rather than individu-als, and the party that garners the most votes wins all the seats. These two systems may be regarded as “hypermajoritarian,” in that they tend to translate small advantages in votes into larger advantages in seats.

Plurality/majority systems are used in many countries around the world. Along with the United Kingdom and many of its former colonies, including India and Canada, the United States has long embraced the FPTP system. TRS, on the other hand, is used by France and many coun-tries historically influenced by France. AV is used on the national level in Australia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea. BV is used in 11 countries or territories spread across the globe, mostly in smaller entities where par-ties are weak. PBV is used in Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, and Singapore.

Proportional representation (PR). The main goal of PR is to transfer the share of votes received by a party into a corresponding proportion of seats in the legislative body. It is used only in multimember districts. There are two main types of PR systems: List PR and the Single Transfer-able Vote (STV). List PR is much more common worldwide than STV.

Under List PR, seats are allocated to political parties on the basis of votes cast for party lists, with the percentage of votes at the ballot box roughly translating into the same percentage of legislative seats. List PR is put into practice in different ways. In “closed-list” systems, voters can vote only for party lists, and cannot express any preference for individual candidates. In “open-list” systems, voters may express a pref-erence for candidates within the party lists, while in “free-list” systems they may even express a preference for a candidate outside the party list that they have chosen.

Under the STV system, voters rank candidates. The quota of votes required for victory is determined, and any candidate who receives at least that amount immediately wins a seat. The least successful candi-dates are then weeded out and their votes are redistributed. Votes from successful candidates that are above the quota are also redistributed. The redistribution continues until the remaining seats are filled.

List PR, widely used in Western Europe, Latin America, and Africa, is employed by more than one-third of the world’s countries and territo-ries—more than any other system. It is interesting to note, however, that FPTP is used by almost twice as many people in the world as List PR (43.5 percent of people living in countries that have direct elections, versus 23.9 percent), in large part because FPTP is used in such large countries as India and the United States. The STV system, though popu-lar with political scientists, is used on the national level only in the Republic of Ireland and Malta.

Mixed. Under mixed systems, there are two groups of elected mem-bers: one group elected under a plurality/majority system, the other under a PR system. The elections for the two groups of members can be linked to produce a relatively proportional result (Mixed-Member Pro-

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TABLE 2—CHANGES TO ELECTORAL SYSTEMS (1993–2004)
			NEW SYSTEM
OLD SYSTEM	Plurality/					Total
	Majority	PR	Mixed		Other	(old systems)
Plurality/Majority	Bermuda	Iraq	Lesotho		Afghanistan	19
	Fiji	Moldova	Monaco		Jordan
	Mongolia	Rwanda	New Zealand
	Montserrat	Sierra Leone	Philippines
	Papua NG	South Africa	Russia
			Thailand
			Ukraine
PR	Madagascar		Bolivia			4
			Italy
			Venezuela
Mixed		Croatia	Mexico			3
		Macedonia
Other			Japan			1
Total (new systems)	6	7	12		2	27

portional, or MMP) or conducted independently of each other (Parallel System, or PS).

The MMP system first developed in post–World War II Germany is now also used in Albania, Bolivia, Hungary, Italy, Lesotho, Mexico, New Zealand, and Venezuela. The Parallel System is used in 21 coun-tries across the globe, including the Russian Federation and Japan.

Other. Some other systems, such as the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV), the Limited Vote (LV), and the Borda Count (BC), do not fit neatly into any of these categories. In translating votes into seats, these systems tend to have effects somewhere between those of the plurality/ majority and PR systems. SNTV was installed for parliamentary elec-tions in Afghanistan in 2005, though it is a much criticized system. LV is used by Spain to elect its upper house, while only Nauru uses BC.

Trends in Electoral-System Changes

Mapping changes between 1993 and 2004 in a total of 213 countries and territories, International IDEA’s Electoral System Design handbook found 27 changes of electoral system type (not included in the 27 is Kyrgyzstan, which made a change and then changed back). These are summarized in Table 2 above.

These data show a trend away from plurality/majority systems toward proportional-representation systems. The most common change was from systems of plurality/majority to mixed systems (7 countries).

Table 2 understates the degree of change in electoral-system arrange-ments around the world. In addition to the 13 percent of countries and territories that have made a change in their system type, many others have

22 A Global Snapshot

made changes within their existing system—for example, by changing the number of members elected from each electoral district, by introduc-ing or changing threshold vote levels that parties or candidates are required to achieve to be allowed representation, or by introducing or restricting voter choice between candidates in party-list–based systems. While such changes may look technical in nature, they can have profound effects on who is elected and thus on the way in which the political system works.

In most cases where the system type itself has changed, a major crisis of representation has been necessary to trigger the change. In Papua New Guinea, more than half the winners in the 2002 parliamentary elec-tions polled less than 20 percent of the vote, which inevitably raised questions about the legitimacy of those elected. The subsequent change from FPTP to AV in Papua New Guinea in 2003 was hardly surprising. Crises can also occur in established democracies. In two successive general elections in New Zealand, the party with the most votes none-theless found itself in opposition; ultimately, after two referenda were held in the 1990s, the system was changed from FPTP to MMP. In Italy and Japan, the loss of confidence in the whole political system engen-dered by endemic corruption scandals also led to electoral system changes; Italy changed from List PR to MMP in 1993, and Japan from SNTV to the Parallel System in 1994.

System changes also arise in transitions to democracy—sometimes when the transition is peaceful and domestically driven, and almost always when the transition follows violent conflict and is internation-ally driven. Iraq is a prime recent example of this. The Two-Round System for parliamentary elections, used during the time of the monar-chy and as the framework for the sham elections of the Saddam Hussein era, was replaced by a List PR system in 2004—a change proposed by the United Nations and embraced by the interim Iraqi government.2

In Latin America, there has increasingly been a trend toward MMP, with Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico all moving in this direction. In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, many countries of the former Soviet bloc, such as Estonia, Bulgaria, Poland, Moldova, and Romania, turned to List-PR systems. Other countries, including Hun-gary, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine, have introduced mixed systems, whereby at least half of their parliamentary seats are elected by FPTP and the remainder by PR.

What might explain this general trend toward greater proportional-ity? PR systems may be particularly valuable in countries where there is a real need to reflect ethnic, economic, or social diversity, or which are seeking to ensure that not only parties with substantial support but also relatively small groups are represented in the elected assembly. Gener-ally, more women and ethnic minorities are elected to legislatures under proportional electoral systems. Strong democracies have grown up in many European countries that have chosen to use List-PR systems, in-

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cluding the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. In 1922, the Repub-lic of Ireland adopted STV, which has helped to produce one of the strongest and most vibrant democracies in Europe.

There have been some notable exceptions to the overall trend toward greater proportionality; Afghanistan in particular has bucked this trend. By definition, proportionality requires identifiable parties or groupings that can be proportionally represented. In Afghanistan, concerns about participation by political groups linked to warlords, combined with the negative connotation of the concept of party (left over from the commu-nist years), led to the presidential election being conducted on a nonparti-san basis. All presidential candidates ran as independent candidates in a Two-Round System. In the run-up to the 2005 parliamentary elections for the 249-member Wolesi Jirga (the directly elected lower house of the Af-ghan legislature), extensive discussions were held to decide which elec-toral system to use. Eventually, the SNTV system was chosen. Newly elected president Hamid Karzai was committed to maintaining nonpartisanship in the system. Sixty-eight of the 249 seats were reserved for women. No par-ties were allowed, and all candidates ran as independents.3

The wholesale change of an electoral system is hard to achieve. Most countries’ electoral systems are governed by ordinary laws, and thus systems may be altered within the legislative bodies. A number of coun-tries, however, have somehow incorporated details of their electoral systems into their constitutions, and constitutions are usually more dif-ficult to change than ordinary laws. Nonetheless, whether the electoral system is controlled by the constitution or by ordinary laws, political will on the part of elites is needed to change electoral systems, and political elites will often not seriously consider significantly changing a system unless they perceive some benefit to themselves.

Even if the appropriate political actors recognize the need for elec-toral-system reform, another problem arises in choosing the best electoral system to replace the old. In Mexico, the creation of a Parallel System in 1994 led to the most disproportional result the country ever had with a mixed system (the system was later changed again, to MMP). Addition-ally, because electoral systems are so complex, long-term benefits from electoral-system change are difficult to assess.

The Effects of Electoral-System Change

Implementing a new electoral system is a complex task. In selecting an electoral system, a vital consideration is the question of its impact on the administration of elections. How will elections actually be car-ried out under an electoral system in a given country, and what effects will they have, given the facts on the ground?

Many factors must be taken into account when considering which electoral system to implement and how a system can be effectively

24 A Global Snapshot

administered in a country. Five key factors to consider are: 1) electoral boundaries; 2) voter education; 3) the modernization of election equip-ment; 4) ballot papers and counting; and 5) long-term sustainability.

1. Electoral boundaries. The process of delineating district bound-aries is a fundamentally political task: All boundaries create political winners and losers. In plurality/majority systems in particular, the de-sign of districts is a challenging and daunting task. Many countries that use FPTP, like Canada and Britain, are required to develop boundaries for single-member districts on the basis of a regular boundary delimita-tion process. If this must be done prior to each parliamentary election, it is an expensive and time-consuming process. If it is less regular, signifi-cant discrepancies in the size of electoral districts can result. In the United States, for example, boundaries of congressional districts are determined by each of the fifty state legislatures using data generated from the decennial national census. The drawing of these boundaries has always been a volatile and politically charged matter.

Any process that defines boundaries requires substantial time and consultation if it is to be accepted as fair by electoral participants. This means that it is rarely possible to define new electoral districts during democratic transitions, when political momentum and the euphoria of transition create well-nigh irresistible pressures for elections to take place on fast timetables. In addition, almost all political participants in any negotiations over a new institutional framework know that concessions are more valuable the later they are made; it is thus almost inevitable that the time available for processes of boundary definition—and in-deed for other aspects of election organization—will be eaten away.

2. Voter education. In newly established democracies, legislators do not always have a good grasp of the concept of “their constituents.” At the same time, voters may not fully understand that they are electing legislators to represent them and their communities. In countries with high levels of illiteracy, such as Afghanistan, these concepts can be especially difficult to convey without adequate voter and civic educa-tion efforts. Trying to explain the methodology of voting in countries with low literacy levels can be challenging when more complex sys-tems are chosen.

3. Modernization of election equipment. With the growing interna-tional trend toward modernization of voting equipment, the selection of electoral systems is one factor that can heavily impact election ad-ministration. In India, the introduction of electronic voting machines has helped make elections successful. India’s current FPTP system for the election of parliamentarians made it possible for the Indian Election Commission to develop a very effective and low-cost electronic sys-tem; under some other electoral systems, the development of a successful electronic voting system would have been much more difficult.

The electoral authorities in the Republic of Ireland spent millions of

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dollars in 2004 to introduce a new electronic voting system for parlia-mentary elections. Ireland uses the Single Transferable Vote, however, a system that requires voters to express a series of preferences on the ballot paper. At the last minute, a decision was made to scrap the elec-tronic voting system due to concerns that it was not sufficiently voter-friendly. Instead, Ireland returned to the traditional paper ballot for the 2004 parliamentary elections.

4. Ballot papers and counting. It is essential for election administra-tors to organize voter-friendly elections, though it is important to remember that administrators can only operate within the confines of the constitution and the electoral law. The ease of voting-equipment use and of voting procedure can help to enhance the integrity of the election process in the eyes of the voter, as well as lay a positive foun-dation for the future. An example of a system that does not meet these criteria is found in Fiji. The legislative ballot allows voters to vote either in one section of the ballot paper for a party (and see their vote transferred to other candidates according to preferences submitted by that party) or in a second section for individual candidates. If the voter chooses to vote for individual candidates, preferences must be expressed for at least three-quarters of the candidates on the ballot paper. In the first two elections held so far under this system, well over 10 percent of the votes cast have been invalid.

In Iraq’s December 2005 National Assembly elections, a total of 996 parties and political entities were on the ballot, presenting a total of 7,655 candidates. Voters were faced with mammoth bedsheet-sized bal-lots and faced a daunting task in making their final selection and casting their votes. Due to the number of political entities on the ballot, the Independent Election Commission of Iraq (IECI) had to purchase spe-cially designed ballot boxes to accommodate the extremely large ballots. Counting was a slow and tedious process. As a result, it took nearly one month for all of the votes to be counted and for the IECI to release final results. The design of the electoral system enhanced inclusiveness but had heavy costs in the ease of voting and timely counting—a good example of the way in which desirable qualities of electoral systems sometimes tug in opposite directions. Electoral-system design ultimately involves a set of choices: designers must choose which desirable quali-ties are of highest value and which of secondary importance.

5. Long-term sustainability. Long-term sustainability of the elec-toral process needs to be considered, especially when relatively complex electoral systems are under consideration. When a first-time democratic election is organized by an international transitional presence, or with substantial international technical assistance and funds, almost any-thing can be made to work. At a second or third election, when external resources no longer flow so freely, the organization of a sustainable electoral process is dependent on the financial resources available within

26 A Global Snapshot

the national budget and the human resources of the country—both of which may be limited and subject to other urgent demands. While too much simplicity in electoral-system design in transitions can ignore potential constructive approaches to state building, too much complex-ity may lead to ineffectiveness in the longer term.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right to vote as a fundamental human right. Electoral systems provide the framework that guarantees people the right to have a voice in how they are governed. Countries need to consider historical, cultural, and social factors in the choice of an electoral system and to engage stake-holders in the discussion to increase the likelihood that the electorate will accept the legitimacy of elections. Criteria for choice can include building stable and efficient governments; enabling effective legisla-tive opposition and oversight to develop; supporting accountability of governments and of individual elected members for their performance; developing vibrant political parties; and providing incentives for con-flict mitigation. Together with other design aims such as strengthening civil society and encouraging press freedom, the choices made are fun-damental to laying the foundation for a culture of democracy.

Ill-conceived electoral systems can undermine popular support for democratic governance, while well-designed electoral systems can help to establish systems that encourage popular participation and ensure the long-term success of democracy. As former Philippine president Fidel Ramos once said, “Governments may come and go, but the people remain. It is the majesty of people power that we exalt when we build functioning and free electoral systems.”

NOTES

1. Andrew Reynolds, Ben Reilly, and Andrew Ellis, Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook (Stockholm: IDEA, 2005), available online at www.idea.int.

2. For more information on Iraq’s electoral-system change, see the chapter by Adeed Dawisha and Larry Diamond on pp. 224–38 of this volume.

3. For more information on Afghanistan’s SNTV system, see the chapter by Andrew Reynolds on pp. 210–23 of this volume.