There is no justification for that statement. It may be said that if C's votes were not distributed, the 4,000 electors who voted for him are disfranchised, but under the present system, the 6,000 electors who voted for A are disfranchised, and if it is wrong not to give the 4,000 who voted for C a second chance, there is a 50 per cent greater wrong in not giving the 6,000 who voted for A a second chance.
The argument in favour of this system, is, that since the voters who voted for C did not poll in sufficient strength to elect their candidate, they should get a second chance. As a result of the manipulation of the votes, candidate A is defeated, and I maintain that in these circumstances the 6,000 who voted for him have at least an equal right to get a second chance of electing their candidate. It is possible that if these 6,000 votes were distributed in accordance with the same principle on which the other 4,000 were distributed, they would go: 4,000 to C and 2,000 to B. The result then would be: B, 7,000 and C, 8,000. It is a reasonable proposition that the 6,000 voters have an equal right to have their second preferences considered as the 4,000 voters have. Therefore it could be claimed that if a majority wanted B, a bigger majority wanted C.
Take then the 5,000 who voted for B. Their second preferences have not been considered. It is conceivable that if their second preferences were considered, the result would be: 2,000 to A and 3,000 to C. A would then have 8,000 and C 7,000. I maintain it is unjust to consider the second preferences of one group only who have failed to elect their candidate, and to ignore other groups who have failed to elect their candidate. The fact that you do it in the case of a minority only aggravates the injustice. If it is an injustice to allow people to disfranchise themselves by choosing a candidate who gets a minority of votes, then you should devise some fair and logical way of bringing them back into the reckoning. The present system only results in transferring the injustice—if there is an injustice— from the minority to the majority.
If the second preference votes are to be considered, it should be done in the case of all. I have shown that if you do that in accordance with the ridiculous principle that a second choice is of equal value with a No. 1 vote, you are likely to arrive at the conclusion that a majority of the electorate wanted each of the candidates and of course that is absurd. But if you base your reasoning on an absurd. assumption, you are very likely to arrive at an absurd conclusion, and nothing can be more absurd than to allot the same value to a second preference vote as to a first preference vote. I maintain it is nonsense to do that.
P.R. would be unjustifiable even if it stopped at that, but a system of election that visualises the possibility of even a 13th or 14th preference vote being given the same importance as a first preference vote is obviously ridiculous. We are advised under P.R. to exercise the franchise fully by voting for every candidate on the ballot paper and I can remember seeing over 20 candidates on a ballot paper. Surely if in circumstances like that the earlier preferences indicate degrees of preferences for the candidates, the later ones merely indicate degrees of dislike. Under P.R., a vote, which merely means that a particular candidate is slightly less objectionable than any of the remainder, may be treated in the same way as the vote giving the person's first choice.
It is unjustifiable to manipulate people's votes in accordance with arbitrary rules like those, but when only a limited investigation is carried out, it is worse still. If there is to be manipulation of the votes, it should at least be done in a thorough manner and there should at least be a thorough investigation and application of the system. I have shown that if you have a thorough application of the system on which P.R. is based, the system will be exposed for the fraud and cod which Deputy Dillon has declared it to be.
Deputy J.A. Costello referred to the defects in the system. It is obvious that he has some other proportional system in mind, but he wants to leave the position vague. As he said himself, he wants to leave it vague so that the Dáil may be in a position to change it. So far, however, he has refused to be drawn as to what the defects are or how he would propose to remedy them. One thing is obvious, that whatever alternatives system he has in mind, it is not for submission to the people. He wants a blank cheque to bring in whatever change he thinks is desirable. I have pointed to a fundamental defect and I should be interested to know how it is proposed to overcome that.
One could think of other ways in which one could consider the distribution of the second and subsequent preference votes but I think, in any of these systems, and I can think of several, one would still be forced to the conclusion that they are all of an arbitrary nature. The correct and the most feasible thing to do is to accept the vote as the people express it and to abandon the mathematical manipulation of the votes after they are cast particularly as the system of manipulation has no logical or democratic basis at all.
In considering any of these systems, I am driven to the conclusion that it is much more simple and much more democratic to ask the people to indicate what candidates they want elected and to accept the result as they express it without making any attempt to prove by mathematical trickery that they did not mean what they said. In the example which I have quoted more people wanted A than wanted B or C and therefore, in common justice, I think A should be elected. It is very easy to give an actual example from an election of how the present system has operated unfairly. It is very easy to show from the figures in many actual elections that there is no logical basis and no justification at all for the way some of the seats were allotted.
However, it is hardly necessary for me to do that. In the last General Election in 1957 there were 13 per cent. of the voters whose votes were disregarded in the way I have described merely because they happened to vote for candidates who got sufficient support to remain in the fight up to the closing stages. On the other hand, there were 17 per cent. of the electorate who voted for candidates who got negligible support and who were eliminated in the early stages of the procedure and whose No. 2's were treated as No. 1's and in most cases their subsequent preferences were treated as actual votes also.
If that 17 per cent. which I have mentioned would have been treated unjustly in not having account taken of their preference votes, then the 13 per cent. mentioned were in fact treated unfairly. In contrast to that, you had the 21 per cent. of the electorate who voted for candidates who obtained surpluses. Their second preferences were taken into account in a different way. They were given fractional values ranging from .007 to .441. The remaining 49 per cent. had their votes credited only to those for whom they were cast. No account was taken of their second preference at all.
The net result of the 1957 General Election, therefore, was that 62 per cent. of the electorate had their votes treated in the same way as that in which we now propose they should be treated in future, 21 per cent. had their second preferences given fractional values and a favoured 17 per cent. had their second preferences treated as if they had been No. 1's and in most cases their later preferences also. I can see no justification for this and I think it would be much fairer if everybody's vote was treated as the votes of the majority of the 62 per cent. were treated in 1957.
The statement has been made here that the ideal Parliament would be one in which all groups would be represented. That argument is also unsustainable. Suppose we could provide such a system under which all groups would be represented in proportion to the support they got from the people throughout the country, I think that such a Parliament would not represent the will of the people. There are so many aspects to the national life and so many different interests that there would be a large number of groups represented in such circumstances. The object of elections is to provide the country with a Government to guide the nation along certain lines. If you have a large number of small groups the only result will be chaos and stalemate.
We have seen how the election of a large number of small groups has worked out in France and other countries. Even though the people in these countries did vote for these small groups nobody voted for the position of stalemate in the formation of Government. There may be some people who would be anxious to see such a condition of affairs here but their number would be very small. The present system is designed to bring about such a position.
Elections are not a game. They should be treated in a straightforward manner. They should not be used for the purpose of experimenting with all sorts of ridiculous theories or to bring about interesting but unworkable results. The results which P.R. bring about could be interesting. It is interesting to see the jockeying and the bargaining for position that goes on in the formation of Coalition Governments but it is a very serious position for the country. It would be all right if the objective was to provide a debating society for the entertainment of the people but the objective of elections is to provide a Government for the country and that it is serious business.
I do not know that it is desirable to encourage people to adopt a purely selfish or sectional approach to national problems. The nation consists of all classes of people and the proper approach to the election of a Government is to subordinate personal interests as far as possible to the interests of the well-being of the community as a whole. P.R. is admitted to be designed to encourage people to organise themselves into political Parties in accordance with their own narrow interests and it was imposed here because it was clearly seen that it must eventually lead to political chaos. The fact that it did not produce that result yet is due to the peculiar circumstances which operated here but it was with that object in view that it was imposed and it is time the people were given the opportunity to get rid of this dangerous system.
It is worth remarking that the man who presented us with this system made no attempt to confer the same benefit on his own country. Deputy MacEoin has stated that since opportunity was not taken of removing the system in the Constitution of 1937, it could not now be claimed that it had been imposed from outside. The Deputy knows well why it was not attempted to remove it at the time of bringing in the new Constitution. He knows that at that time there was very strong opposition to the Constitution and he knows that it was just as unscrupulous as the campaign which is now being waged against this proposal. The charge of dictatorship was made then. Women were to be imprisoned in their homes. Possibly, if this one more argument had been available to the Fine Gael Party, we would probably still have the foreign-imposed Constitution here and still have the Irish Free State here.
I went looking for the rules under which P.R. is conducted. I did that because I had noticed at different elections procedures I considered to be very peculiar. I find there are 12 rules, some of them being divided into as many as 11 sections and some of the sections sub-divided a number of times again. You would think that such a set of complicated rules represented a very thorough and painstaking attempt to establish a system of election giving effect to the idea of proportionality, to the idea of allocating votes in accordance with the number of people voting in a particular way.
The first thing which is obvious on looking through the rules is that the idea of proportionality was abandoned in the very early stages of the manipulation of the vote. I have dealt with the system on which the votes of eliminated candidates are distributed. Rule 6 deals with what is called the transferring of surpluses. That rule provides further evidence of unfair discrimination against the majority.
Rule 6 (2) (b) deals with the question of a surplus, when the votes credited to the elected candidate consist of original and transferred votes. It provides that only the transferred votes shall be considered in the distribution of the surplus. This means that, even if such a candidate had 9/10 ths of a quota of original votes and received the remainder from one or more candidates, it is the lower preferences of these candidates who made a negligible impression on the electorate that receive further consideration and not those cast for a man who made a reasonable appeal to the electorate, even though these votes which he got by way of transfer may have been used three or four times already. Surely, if the votes of an elected candidate are to be dealt with on a selective basis in regard to the distribution of the surplus, it should be the votes he got in the ballot himself that should be so considered and not those he got merely because of this system of P.R.—either that, or they should all be considered for distribution.
Rule 6 (3) deals with the distribution of the surplus of a candidate elected with original votes only. It provides that, if he has a number of non-transferable votes, some of these must be included in his surplus, thereby reducing the amount of the surplus available for distribution. I think that that contrasts with the way in which the second preferences votes of a candidate who is eliminated are dealt with. His second preferences are considered as No. 1 but, in the case of an elected candidate, his second preferences only have a fractional value depending on the relation of the size of his surplus to his total vote.
This Rule 6 (3) further reduces that fraction. It provides that a certain number of these non-transferable votes —in other words, votes in which the voter was so definite in his choice as to refuse to vote for anybody else except his own selected candidate—will be set aside and described as non-transferable votes, not effective. This is a system that is supposed to interpret the wishes of the people accurately but here, where a voter expresses his opinion with the utmost clarity, the Returning Officer can take the vote and set it aside and describe it as non-effective.
It is bad enough to give a candidate votes not cast for him as is done but to take from him votes that were cast for him in the most definite way possible and set them aside is a worse principle still. I wonder how many people who give candidates votes which are, described as "plumpers" know that they are liable to be taken and set aside by the Returning Officer.
Apart from this, however, the distribution of a surplus is at least dealt with in a proportional way. They are distributed in proportion to the people voting No. 2 for the different candidates. However, all pretence at distributing the votes in accordance with the proportions voting in different ways is abandoned at this stage because a further section of this rule, (4) (d) provides that the distribution of votes will be effected by a physical transferring of a number of actual papers to the appropriate continuing candidate and that the papers so transferred will be those last filed in the sub-parcels concerned—in other words, the papers to take a further part in the election are selected completely at random.
Remember that if, as a result of this, a further candidate is elected, it is these votes, selected at random as they are, that are eligible for redistribution. No attempt is made to distribute these in proportion to the No. 3's on the papers of the candidate for whom they were cast. Surely, if the second preferences are to be distributed proportionately, so also should the No. 3's. Obviously, the inventors of this perfect system could not face up to the difficulties involved in applying their theory consistently and so they abandoned the principle on which it was supposed to be based at an early stage in the manipulation of the votes.
It would have been quite feasible to distribute the No. 3's proportionately if the original transaction had been carried out as a paper transaction rather than by a physical transferring of actual papers but, while I say it can be done, to do so would make a system that is already cumbersome and complicated more cumbersome and more complicated and would expose P.R. for what Deputy Dillon described it to be. I suppose it was to avoid that that no attempt was made to apply the principle of the system beyond the preliminary stages.
I think that the vote of the people, which, is the basis of democracy, is an important thing. It should not be treated lightly. It should be exercised with care and it should be our objective to encourage people to treat the privilege of being able to vote in a responsible way, rather than encourage them to exercise their franchise in an irresponsible way.
Under present conditions, the irresponsible voter can say: "I can vote for this candidate, although I know he is not going to get many votes and then I can vote for someone else and it will not make any difference." That is wrong and the system of election should not encourage such an attitude.
The line that has been taken in the speeches so far shows, I think, that the approach of the Opposition has been to try to make political capital for themselves out of this proposal rather than to consider what is best for the country. The future of Fianna Fáil is in no way bound up with the abolition of P.R. Everybody here knows that, but still there is an all-out attempt being made to convince the people that the idea behind the proposal is to perpetuate the Fianna Fáil Party. The Fianna Fáil Party will remain as the major Party so long as we can retain the confidence of the people and no longer.
If the people at any time decide they do not want us, the Party will decline, no matter what system of election is in operation. If we feared such a decline of public support, I think it is obvious that we would have been anxious to retain P.R. rather than change it. We have done very well, as a number of the Opposition Deputies have remarked, under P.R. The Party grew up with it. Our organisation is geared for P.R. and if it is abolished, it must be disrupted and re-aligned to suit the new circumstances. Therefore, if the only question in our mind was that of retaining our own representation at its maximum even if we were to lose public support, it is obvious that we would not dream of abolishing P.R., but because the possible effects of the system can be so disastrous for the country, we think the people should be given the opportunity of changing the system.
I should like somebody to tell us how the removal of P.R. can favour Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil only. If a Fine Gael candidate can get more votes at an election in any constituency, he will be elected. Therefore, the Fine Gael and Labour contention that this will mean the perpetuation of Fianna Fáil can only mean that they realise their own policy is so devoid of merit that they could not ever hope to gain more support from the people than Fianna Fáil. If their policy is better than ours, then surely it must be possible to convince the people that that is so. If they succeed in convincing the people that their policy is better than ours, then the only effect of the abolition of P.R. would be that the decision of the people would be decisive, but if they are to gain more support than we gain and if P.R. remains, the only difference will probably be that we will then be in a position such as they were in in 1948 or 1954 to bargain with whatever other small groups may be in existence in order to form a Government, that is only if we were prepared to abandon our principles, as they were, for the sake of office. The system we are proposing means stable government. It is well known that the Fine Gael Party, when they were first formed, were in favour of the abolition of P.R.
