Away from the mass meetings, the billboards, the flyers, the house visits, and the meet and greets, there are a lot of intricacies to running a general election purely from a procedural point of view.
From start to finish, the election is a complex process which is, to its credit, run very efficiently by the Electoral Commission. However, this is not to say that there aren’t ways for the process to be improved and for life to be made easier for any eligible voter.
One of the cardinal examples is how Malta handles allowing its citizens who are living abroad to vote for the elections.
This will be another election where the only way that Maltese people who live abroad can vote is by having to fly into Malta to physically vote in the voting booths. Indeed, Malta is one of very few countries to not have any form of facility for its nationals to be able to vote abroad – be it through mail-in voting or embassy voting, or anything of that sort.
The only facility made available for voters is a KM Malta Air flight ticket subsidised down to €90 – but this is not a small cost for the voter especially when one takes into account the travel cost to actually get to an airport that flights are offered from, and the potential headache of having to travel for a weekend.
The cost is even more prohibitive for the government: in the last general election, the subsidised flights cost the public coffers €1.9 million – which represented a whopping 22% of the total cost of the election, within the context of that election being held under some Covid-19 restrictions.
Yet, it seems that there isn’t the political will anymore to make voting easier for those who are living abroad. Maybe there is an intrinsic fear in both parties of the unknown quantity that a foreign voter could present in an election, and the impact that could have on the final result.
Likewise, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for electoral reform. Promises for electoral reform made in Labour’s 2022 general election manifesto were not kept.
For instance, proposal 909 recognised that the country’s proportional representation system reflects voter preference in the best way possible but also suggested that there are aspects which do not necessarily reflect today’s realities.
“We will issue a public consultation to better understand the views of citizens about this subject, especially those citizens not involved in politics,” the PL manifesto promised.
No such public consultation was issued in the past legislature.
Likewise, proposal 914 promised that the process for people to be able to use their Identity Card as a voting document would start. We are coming to the end of this legislature this month, and this possibility is nowhere in sight.
People will still need a voting document to vote, as it has been in the past.
The most recent electoral reform was to introduce the gender corrective mechanism, which was first used in the last general election in 2022. But even that was tainted by the hands of partisan politics: it was set in such a manner that it only functions for the major two parties, and not any third party. Indeed, if a third party is elected into parliament, the mechanism isn’t used at all.
As things stand, it seems like both sides of the political divide seem quite content with the electoral process remaining as it is. It remains to be seen what their respective electoral manifestos will include, and then even more so if those ideas will go from being on paper to be put into practice.
