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Abstract
In presenting its review of the conduct of the 2007 Kenyan elections, the Kriegler Commission put forward suggestions for electoral reform. The present contribution discusses these alternatives, for both parliamentary and presidential elections, against the background of experience of electoral reform in South Africa and Lesotho. Arguing about the need for electoral reform to change electoral incentives in order to de-emphasise political mobilisation around ethnicity, it stresses the advantages of a shift towards mixed-member proportional election or list system Proportional Representation. Such systems would move away from the winner-take-all logic of the presently established first-past-the-post electoral system, and would provide incentives to politicians to compete for votes across ethnic boundaries. The virtues of a return to the pre-1992 system of indirect election of the president by parliament are also considered. Although it is recognised that wide-ranging reforms of Kenya's political institutions are required if the country's crisis is to be adequately addressed, it is suggested that some significant electoral reform is a necessity.
Notes
1. For discussion of different electoral systems, see Bogdanor and Butler Citation1983.
2. For under conditions of free choice, no single electorate of any significant size can credibly be represented by a single political party.
3. Bogdanor and Butler 1983. The basic mechanics of FPTP revolve around the election of individuals within constituencies who receive the largest number of votes, rather than requiring a majority. Thus in a three candidate election, a candidate who wins, for example, 45% of the vote wins election over competitors who win 44% and 11% of votes cast. If this happens across an entire electorate, a political party can (and often does) win an election with only a minority of the popular vote.
4. The Kriegler Commission (Republic of Kenya Citation2008a, 76) noted that departures from the principle of equal size of constituencies had become extreme. The weight of the vote cast by a Lamu East voter, for instance, was 19 times greater that that of one in Embakasi. ‘In no other country in the world is the difference of such magnitude’. The commission also noted that the skewed size of constituencies was related to the splitting up of small and sparsely populated constituencies in KANU strongholds of the Rift Valley, North-Eastern and Coast provinces.
5. In 1992 the KANU support base came largely from rural constituencies with relatively few voters and where the voter turnout was usually below average, the ruling party winning 100 out of the 188 competitive seats. Seats won by KANU averaged only 33,352 registered voters against an average of 51,850 registered voters in seats won by the opposition (Fox Citation1996, 604). 1n the 1997 elections, KANU won 107 seats against 92 won by opposition parties, yet received only 38% of the vote (Republic of Kenya 2008, 197, n.12).
6. In arguing for electoral reform, Grignon, Mazrui and Rutten (Citation2001, 600) calculate that whereas KANU won 107 seats under the plurality system, application of PR would have reduced them to 93 seats. Without an absolute majority, they would have been forced into coalition with one or more opposition parties to form a government backed by a genuine majority, and with an incentive to deliver to more, if not all Kenyans.
7. Another problem would be that parliamentary run-offs would almost inevitably fuel legal petitions against results by third place candidates so that they could qualify for the second round, thereby holding up the entire process.
8. The death of a registered candidate in one constituency had meant that, under Lesotho's electoral law, that particular election had had to be postponed.
9. The LCD had presented candidates only in the constituency elections but had struck up an alliance with the National Independence Party (NIP), which had only contested the PR poll. LCD and NIP voters had voted for their coalition partner in the PR and constituency elections respectively, at the expense of other parties entitled to compensatory seats on the basis of their share of the national PR votes.
10. In some PR systems, political parties are required to gain a minimum percentage of the vote, usually in the realm of between 1 and 5% to secure representation in parliament.
11. For extended contemporary discussions prior to the adoption of PR in South Africa, see Horowitz Citation1991 and Reynolds Citation1993.
12. Majority victories were secured in 2009 in the KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape provincial election by the ANC in the former (62.95%) and the Democratic Alliance in the latter (51.46%).
13. The above passage draws freely on Judith February Citation2009.
14. Although it needs to be remembered, of course, that the ODM's majority in parliament was in part facilitated by its running as a single party, whereas individuals from component parts of the Kibaki alliance sometimes ran against each other in constituency elections under their own party labels, thereby splitting the pro-government vote.
15. It is worth noting that a proposal to introduce a second round of voting for the president was part of a package of reforms proposed by some MPs, but defeated, prior to the election.
16. There is a high turnover of individual MPs, reflective of often intense competition for party nominations at constituency level and the necessity for incumbent MPs to placate their voters with visible rewards.
17. A point discussed in detail in Wolf Citation2006.
18. For one contribution, see Centre for Governance and Development Citation2002.
19. Present inertia around prosecution of alleged perpetrators of election violence means that some hundreds of youths and other activists continue to languish in jail without reasonable prospect of timeous trial.
20. Miller earned his appointment because, in part, he has no obvious connections to political leaders, in contrast with other potential candidates who were backed by diverse political groupings.
