“Given that all other elections (mayors, county council president) use a single-round system, in which the candidate with the most votes wins the seat, the IPP supports adopting the same system to elect deputies and senators, especially if the local elections are to be held at the same time as the parliament elections,” says the NGO’s press release, issued Friday.
The IPP believes that the parties, currently negotiating the electoral framework for 2012, “must not ignore the citizens’ main grievance regarding the way lawmakers are elected.”
“The so-called ‘uninominal’ voting – actually a mixed-member proportional system – to the voters’ surprise, has allowed candidates placed second and third to win in almost a quarter of constituencies, at the expense of those who received the most votes,” says the IPP.
The NGO calls on the parties to decide the changes to election legislation only after an objective evaluation of all its implications, and on the lawmakers to begin debates on amending the legal framework in the upcoming parliamentary session. “This way, the rules will not change during the election process, as has often happened in Romania, irrespective of the ruling party,” the IPP explains.
The Institute points out that a number of MPs were elected despite not receiving the greatest number of votes in their district. According to its analysis, the Liberal Party (PNL) has benefitted the most from this system, as 47% of its deputies and 56% of its senators in the current legislature were placed second, third or even fourth in their constituencies.
Before 2008, elections to Romania’s Parliament used the closed party list system, whereby citizens vote for an entire party-supplied list of candidates. This was changed for the 2008 elections to the current mixed member proportional system, in which citizens vote for a candidate running in their constituency and also for a party. Legislature seats are allotted to each party proportionally to its election score and the extra seats can be filled with candidates who did not win in their electoral district.
Local councils are elected through the closed party list system, but mayors and county council presidents are chosen through the first-past-the-post system, as of 2008.