The end of the preferential vote (hope hope!)

Apparently, the APRA leaders of the Peruvian congress are reading my blog, because as I suggested yesterday in my posting about Peruvian constitutional reform, they've decided to take up the issue of doing away with the preferential vote. If I understand correctly, were this to pass, it would mean the country would be adopting a straight proportional representation electoral rule.

For you non political scientists out there, what this means is that voting districts are big and have more than one representative, and within each big district, congressional seats are allocated to parties based on the percentage of the vote they win. So, for example, the APRA wins 20% of the vote, it gets 20% of the seats, and if the Peruvian Nationalist Party wins 48% of the vote, they get 48% of the seats. Party leaders get to pick who takes a seat in congress, out of their long party list.

This is basically the same as what they do now, except that they have this "preferential vote" thing, in which voters get to indicate on their ballots who they would prefer to be seated from a given party. This sounds like a good idea (more democratic, etc.) but basically means that parties can't hold their representatives responsible for... well... anything, from breaking with the party line in an important vote to accepting bribes or selling government property for personal profit. This is because one of the things that party leaders can do to punish you is just not seat you in congress if they don't get enough votes.

"Sorry, Jaime. You voted against us on the budget, and you've been taking kickbacks on government contracts, and you're accepting narco-cash. So we're going to let somebody who's a little more reliable take your seat."

With the preferential vote, politicians don't need to listen to their party leaders, they just need to get a lot of votes at election time.

The end result is that systems like the one Peru uses now tend to be more corrupt than other systems. They also tend to be more wasteful, but that's a whole other bag of Pirate's Booty.

All of this still doesn't fix the ridiculous local electoral rules, but whatever. These reforms probably won't pass, anyways, but it would be a step in the right direction.