The term
gerrymandering was coined out of the undemocratic
actions of a governor of my home state;
Governor Gerry of Massachusetts.
Governor Gerry redrew the electoral district boundaries in a manner that helped
his party win the largest possible number of seats. The resulting map of the districts was so absurd, resembling the imaginary salamander and hence the term
was invented. Over the years,
gerrymandering has continued in many American states, where the party dominating the state legislators could redraw maps to
serve their own purposes. Gerrymandering is a fundamentally undemocratic
concept; one can look at it as disenfranchisement of those voters, who are
being removed from a district where their votes would make a difference to
another where their votes are unlikely to affect the outcome of a race. A good
example is the carving out of a majority African American area out of a
district, where the democratic leaning African Americans are likely to tip the
balance of a close race, and adding it to a geographically illogical
district that has a large and safe majority of republicans. So instead of the African
American votes helping the democratic candidate win, they are wasted. This is
dirty politics, no one defends as democratic and some states in the US have
made it illegal.
Yet gerrymandering is a relatively benign compared to Ikhwanmandering.
This method of disenfranchisement was used in Egypt’s so called parliamentary
elections in late 2011 and the early part of 2012. Before we get into what happened
in Egypt, let’s just remember what many would know about different election
systems; I offer this as not as a political science specialist, but merely as an interested observer.
First Past The
Post, Run-offs and Proportional Representation:
Nations have addressed methods of achieving representative democracy in different
ways in their constitutions and laws. In the UK and the USA, the First Past The Post is the norm for electing legislators; so whichever candidate gets the most votes in any particular
district gets elected; an imperfect system in many ways, but very simple and
clear. The French attempted to improve this by creating a system of run-offs or second rounds; whereas the
top two vote getters, would have a run off, and whoever gets the most votes is
elected. Other nations such as Germany, Italy and Israel adopt a system of Proportional Representation or PR. Different varieties of PR exist, some where voters would vote for a single list, others
where voters would rank first, second and third choice off of party lists or
candidates. The basic concept of PR is to allow smaller parties to attain
representation. We see countries with First Past The Post essentially limited
in their choice between Republican and Democrats or Labour and Conservatives
whereas with PR, we see far more fragmentation, as in Germany with Social Democrats,
Greens, Left, Christian Democrats and Liberals and similar examples of fragmentation
in Italy, Israel and other countries.
In Egypt, there is a good argument for PR, where Coptic Christians, who
virtually never actually get elected, may be able to have members of
parliament, elected by the people and not appointed by a president. Similarly
the many different strands, emerging in Egyptian political life could be
represented. There is also an argument for the Run-Off system to allow strong
parties to emerge. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan worked with then
governing Junta SCAF to concoct an amazingly complex system for the
parliamentary elections. Their cooperation was possible through, what many
assume, an implicit pact designed to marginalize and
limit the influence of the original proponents of the January 25 Revolution of 2011. While many legal
experts opined that some elements of this system would prove to be
unconstitutional, the Ikhwan insisted on this system and were able to
intimidate SCAF sufficiently into accepting it. Let’s now review the
absurdly complex system that was used in Egypt:
Combo system:
The Ikhwanmandering system combines all three systems discussed above together; so we have the
PR system and a direct candidate system as well as a run-off. This basically
results in enlarging the electoral districts sufficiently to make it harder for
those candidates without sufficient organization to compete. The run-offs makes
the campaigns more expensive and difficult and afford the better established
forces a second chance to bring their national organization power into a
district. Sadly, the PR districts while larger than the individual districts,
they are not national and therefore still fail to offer representation for
minority currents, be it Copts, socialists or other voices. Egypt has no local or regionally elected provincial, regional or locally elected bodies, so it was truly absurd to have PR on a district level, not the country as a whole.
The Quote System:
Another tactics of Ikhwanmandering is to further enlarge the districts by
introducing a system of dedicated quota for laborers and peasants. With the
definition being loosened enough to allow for wealthy self employed people to
run for laborer and peasant seats. So an individual in any big Egyptian City
casted votes for an individual candidate, a laborer candidate and a list in his
or her own large districts. The quota system served to make it more difficult
for emerging political forces to compete against the established Ikhwan or
NDP or Mubarak's disbanded party.
Oftentimes people simply voted against the NDP in the second round, much as has
occurred in the
presidential elections. Again, absurdly, while the so called laborer and peasant quota was preserved, the quota for women was dropped.
The Six Week
National Ballots: The parliamentary elections of 2011 were carried out
over six weeks, with the country divided into three regions, first region had
its elections over two days and two weeks later the run offs. The
results were announced and then two weeks later, the next region's elections and
run offs and results and finally the last region. This clearly was designed to
allow for nationally organized forces to be able to support each region in
order. While many also argue that it allowed for fraud, for the purpose of
discussing Ikhwanmandering, I will not address this topic. The choice of which region
goes first needs further research, but it was by no means random. We have seen Ikhwan typically gather their support or protest demonstrations in one or two areas, similarly with elections, it was the use of concentrated national resources to help defeat local candidates who were already spread thin over large districts and financially exhausted with runoffs.
Shura Council Too:
As if six weeks of elections were not enough, SCAF and Ikhwan agreed that there
would be a vote for an upper house which would then require six further weeks.
The upper house or Shura had virtually no assigned duties and the vote for it
was held before any constitution was written and it was unclear if it would actually exist at all under a new constitution. Naturally less than 7% of those eligible to
vote bothered to go to
the Shura polls.
Some Muslim Brotherhood apologists would argue in defense of
various aspects of Ikhwanmandering such as the staging of the elections in
regions being required to comply with judicial oversight of the elections and
no enough judges are available to supervise all the polling stations, yet most
judges refused to oversee the referendum over the Ikhwan Constitution and that
did not prevent the very same Ikhwan apologists from declaring that defective
vote democratic.
The Muslim Brotherhood feared democracy and sought to
immunize themselves against it. Their efforts were ultimately about
disenfranchisement of their opponents and counter democratic. They had choices
and at every juncture they opted disenfranchisement.
AA
July 27, 2013
