*
Adam L. Silverman, PhD**
Now that I've got a bit more time***, I wanted to follow up on the breaking news type post I did earlier about the Egyptian Supreme Court Ruling. If you click through to the BBC article I linked to, you'll see towards the bottom that it provides the Egyptian Supreme Court's rationale for, essentially, invalidating the last Egyptian parliamentary election, which for all intents and purposes brings down the government and forces new elections. The BBC reported that: "The court had been considering the validity of last year's parliamentary election, because some of the seats were contested on a proportional list system, with others on the first-past-the-post system. It decided that the election law had allowed parties to compete for the one third of seats reserved for independent candidates."
So what exactly is a first past the post and proportional list election? It is a really funky hybrid of an open list system - any one can run for office and if you get the most votes (either plurality or majority depending on the rules) you win. This works even if one is party affiliated. This is, with a few tweaks, what we use here in the US for our legislatures and it is what is used in a lot of other places regardless of type of legislature. A proportional list system, however, apportions seats based on the percentage of vote for party. The parties produce lists, numbered from one through the upper limit for the legislative chamber (usually a parliament) and if they get 40% of the vote, the first 40% of the people on their lists get a seat in the legislature. Often there is a minimum threshhold, so if a party gets fewer than say 10 or 20% of the votes, none of its members will be seated. An open list (first past the post)/ proportional representation system was the wacked out system the Iraqis decided on in 2008 for their provincial elections that didn't happen until 2009. In this system, which is what the Egyptian Supreme Court just nullified, the problem is that even if you are first past the post running on the open list side, if someone is on a party list, and based on the proportional vote that party gets to seat its percentage of candidates, you can loose, even though you've won more votes, because the proportional representation portion can push your opponent over the top. If reading this has given you a nosebleed you ARE NOT ALONE!!! It almost drove the Awakenings guys out in Anbar back into insurgency in 2009, when it looked like they were going to have seeming first past the post electoral victories nullified by the proportional representation results of their opponents. This was fortunately settled before too much bloodshed occurred, but basically it is a really bad system to use. The only place it has ever been used effectively is in Switzerland. In the other places its been tried, such as Brazil, Italy, and Indonesia - it has not produced the proper electoral results (but given that it seems to be a Rube Goldberg type electoral system it may still have produced the desired political results). If you want to have a better understanding of how it fits together, here's the UN Fact Sheet I referenced when I was writing the briefing papers to explain this for my BCT commander in Iraq. Basically no one had heard of this before the Iraqis came up with the idea, so no one had any way of knowing it needed to be stopped until it was too late - not that we could've done much about it anyway.
* The image is of The Question. COL Lang asked me to either start using an avatar or a picture of myself and when given a choice decided the faceless Question was the better choice. For full citation: The Question was originally a Charleton Comics character, later acquired by DC Comics, and created by Steve Ditko. He is faceless (its a hi tech synthetic flesh mask), something of a conspiracy theorist detective/information overload kind of character, was originally an Objectivist, but ultimately became more of an Asian philosophy/martial arts sort of type. This image is taken from the cartoon representation from the early to mid 2000s. I am not actually faceless, am not an Objectivist, do study Asian philosophy and actually run the aikido dojo at USAWC, was not created by Steve Ditko (as far as my parents told me), but do love conspiracy theory documentaries, as well as the ones on Bigfoots (or is that Bigfeet...), and the hallmark of a good cultural advisor is to live on information overload. For more Question info - the wikipedia entry is pretty good. So I'll be using this as an avatar going forward, provided DC comics doesn't send me a cease and desist notice...
** Adam L. Silverman, PhD is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College (USAWC). The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of USAWC and/or the US Army.
*** By more time I mean just that. I've been providing a ton of operational support over the past six months and have been just swamped. Things should, hopefully, slow down a bit in the next ten days or so so I can spend a bit more time here at SST.
