Charter changes hit a snag

Talks between the ruling party and "others" have reached a stumbling block with the Democrats disagree-ing over whether the election formula in the current charter should be changed.

And since this is a matter of life and death in politics, the conflict is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

"The others", who include representatives from other political parties and the Senate, want to go back to the formula in the 1997 Constitution, which was scrapped by the 2006 coup-makers.

That system was for each constituency to be repre-sented by just one MP, and national votes were combined to calculate how many party-list seats each party got.

Under the current system, each constituency can have up to 3 MPs and a zoning for-mula is used to allocate party-list seats (eight zones each with 10 party-list MPs).

It doesn't need to be said that the Democrats have ben-efited more from this system and vice versa for the others. Official arguments, though, focus on democratic values.

Advocates of the one-MP per constituency system say this was the most democratic method.

It was unfair for one voter to be represented by one MP, while other voters had two or three representatives.

The Democrats insisted the "better democracy" argument overlooks the "reality" that the smaller a constituency is, the easier it is to buy votes or organise unscrupulous can-vassing. This system, they said, encouraged patronage and made it very difficult for new faces to break into poli-tics.

When it comes to party-lists, "the others" said the old sys-tem favoured "the country's best", while the current one favours "each region's best". Applying the logic that the party-list system should pro-duce the best possible repre-sentatives to serve the coun-try, "the others" conclude that the old system was better.

But the Democrats argue that the "country's best" were normally wealthy financiers of political parties. The zoning system, they said, produced greater diversity in Parliament.

The two sides, however, agree that "capital punish-ment" - the dissolution of political parties whose execu-tives are found guilty of poll fraud - should be abolished. But the Democrats want to maintain the blanket ban on party executives if a fraud occurs among them, while "the others" wanted to punish the real offenders only.