Guest post from David Jandura, a student in the MA in Democracy and Governance Program. David takes a look at Sudan’s electoral system:

In the world of electoral system design, there are advantages and disadvantages to the many types of systems that exist.  It would probably be incorrect to say that any one system is “better” than another, because better is dependent upon what your priorities are.  One of the many advantages of a proportional representation, or PR system, for example, is that it does a relatively good job of ensuring that electors’ votes accurately translate into who is elected with less “wasted votes.” While it may be wrong to say which system is better, however, I don’t think it’s wrong to look at a system and question what its priorities are.  Sudan is a good case in point.  The nation claims to have a parallel system, which includes a significant amount of PR seats, yet the Sudanese have managed to create a PR tier that doesn’t actually deliver any of the advantages the system is designed to provide.

From IFES electionguide:

60 percent of seats are elected by plurality vote in single-member districts. 15 percent of seats are elected under closed-list proportional representation. Multi-member constituencies correspond to states, and the threshold is 4 percent in each. Finally, 25 percent of seats are elected under closed-list proportional representation from lists that may contain only women. Again, the constituencies correspond to states, and the threshold is 4 percent in each.

Let’s take look at this; out of 450 seats, only 15 and 25 percent respectively are PR tiers.  That means there 112 seats for the women’s tier and 67 seats for the standard one.  Then if we further break them down based on states, of which there are 25 in Sudan, it leaves us with an average of 4.48 seats per district for the women’s tier and 2.68 for the regular.  At this point, what is the purpose of the four percent threshold?  Would there be any district large enough where winning a seat wouldn’t automatically give you four percent?  I’m really curious as to the decision making process in this.  Was the threshold put in without thought as to what purpose it is supposed to serve, because somebody was once told that PR systems should have thresholds?  Or is it strategically there to give the illusion that this is a real system?

Unfortunately, Sudan isn’t the only country that wants to obfuscate the realities of its electoral system.  The Philippines, which will be having a general election on May 10, also has a PR, party-list, tier, which is supposed to contain twenty percent of all seats in the Parliament.  Twenty percent isn’t a lot, and it certainly fails to undermine the clientelist system that Filipino reformers are hoping to overcome.  What’s most disturbing about this party-list tier, however, is that parties are awarded one seat for every two percent of the vote received, while being capped at three seats total.  It’s not surprising, that given these rules, the tier is extremely weak, contains a myriad of insignificant parties, and suffers from a drop off in voter participation.  In fact the seats, which were designed to be filled with representatives of sectoral minorities, are often just filled with allies of the country’s elite class, further ensuring that the system in no way meets any of its stated objectives.

Both of these examples are significant, in that they demonstrate the many ways elites can rig or at least bias an election.  None of these flaws are accidents; you have to try really hard to make a system this ineffective.  (When you design a system where the Energy Secretary and son of the President both win seats reserved for the disadvantaged, you know you’ve done something impressive).

The election monitoring industry is extremely focused on what happens on election day, but in reality,  it’s the decisions made long before any votes are cast that really matter.  In his book Beyond Free and Fair, Eric Bjonrland discusses the international community’s failure to address pre-election conditions in Cambodia’s 1998 election, and the ensuing dilemma over whether to legitimate the outcome.  While the democracy assistance community doesn’t make mistakes like Cambodia anymore, I feel we still don’t do enough to assess how the rules of the game affect the outcomes.

This isn’t to say that election day monitoring isn’t important, it certainly is.  We need to keep in mind, however, that in this day and age, only amateurs rig elections on election day, real professionals make sure they know the outcome beforehand.