Interested, but far too democratic

Always discussed in a ‘by the way' manner, the matter of voter apathy is an issue addressed in the wake of almost every election or referendum. The assembly elections in Northern Ireland last Wednesday however, did not suffer from significant voter apathy with a voter turnout of 63.5 per cent – a relatively high turnout. The weighty issues at stake on this occasion ensured a high turnout but I would argue that the NI system is itself structurally flawed in a way that means the community in the North is poorly served by such elections, despite a high level of participation.
The fact remains that Northern society is still very divided and this is reflected in the polarisation of the results in last week's election but the electoral system itself has itself some notable negative externalities.

The electorate is being short-changed in one particular area that those in the South who share the same electoral system do not suffer. The mechanisms set up under the Good Friday Agreement were initially structured in the hope of facilitating increased participation and representation of minority groups, but I believe the system allows for far too many MLAs, which results in adverse side effects.

It takes very few votes to get elected to the Northern Assembly, with many MLAs getting less than 3,000 first preference votes, with the quota only being met by the transfer of preferences from senior party members within the individual's constituency and not between intra-party transfers. The pragmatism and flexibility that the PR-STV system allows individual voters is somewhat negated as a result of three / four / five members of the same party standing in a six-seat constituency. I believe in a balkanised society having less choice and being forced to think outside the parameters of competing nationalisms could have more social utility than the present system of disproportionally encouraging inter-community voting patterns.

A second and even more important matter is to point out that the province has 108 elected representatives for a relevantly small population of 1.7 million.

Elected representatives are elected to represent but also to get things done, excessive representation has the result that far too many individuals have an entitlement to be heard in the most important decision-making arena of all. I believe this will be democratically impractical and will lead to the formation of both piecemeal and poor legislation. ‘Over-representation' may appear to be rhetorically a self-contradictory concept but I believe it will have real effects, in particular the stalling of progress on issues that really matter to the electorate.

Interested parties in the South would often like to think that the elected MLAs are unrepresentative of the wider community in the North when in fact the PR-STV system and the huge number of members elected mean that far from being unrepresentative, they are in fact far too representative.

Shaun Gavigan, Phibsborough, Dublin 7