The coats of arms of Inari and Lapland by a road in Inari, Finnish Lapland, in September 2018. The Finnish government has outlined a plan to improve the proportionality of the electoral system by merging electoral districts with a particularly high hidden vote threshold, starting with the districts of Lapland and North Ostrobothnia. (Ritva Siltalahti – Lehtikuva)
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THE GOVERNMENT of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) has floated a re-think of the electoral system that would have had a tangible impact on the results of the previous parliamentary elections, reports YLE.
The government has outlined its intention to launch a parliamentary process to merge electoral districts with an especially high hidden vote threshold – the share of votes required to win a seat in parliament – into electoral regions.
The first such region would be created by merging the electoral districts of Lapland and North Ostrobothnia. Both districts would remain independent and retain their current boundaries, but the votes cast in the districts would be tallied together before the seats are distributed between the districts.
The Ministry of Justice has calculated that, in the most recent parliamentary elections, the proposed merger would have granted an additional seat to the Social Democrats at the expense of the National Coalition.
Later, a similar process could be launched for any district where the number of lawmakers to be elected drops below eight or seven due to demographic trends, the government programme says.
“Our calculations suggest that one such district could be Satakunta, where the number of lawmakers can drop below eight or seven in the near future,” Tuomas Rekola, an advisor at the Ministry of Justice, stated to YLE in July.
Finland is presently divided into 13 electoral districts.
The objective of the re-think is to lower the hidden vote threshold. In Lapland, a candidate in the 2023 parliamentary elections needed at least 12.4 per cent of the vote to secure a seat in the Finnish Parliament, according to YLE.
The Finnish public broadcasting company revealed that the idea received a positive welcome from the party secretaries of five parliamentary parties: the Christian Democrats, Green League, Left Alliance, National Coalition and Swedish People’s Party. Anna Moring, the party secretary of the Greens, viewed that the re-shuffle is justified because the high vote threshold is eroding voters’ trust in democracy in Lapland.
Also the Social Democratic Party indicated that it is open to the idea, but it has yet to lock down its stance.
Movement Now argued that the current electoral system works well, while the Finns Party did not respond to the question.
The Centre was most critical of the idea. It argued that the re-think could make the electoral system too complicated and declared that it would not support a system where votes cast in one district could influence the distribution of seats in another.
“The Oulu and Lapland electoral districts together make up almost half of Finland,” Antti Siika-aho, the party secretary of the opposition party, said, pointing to the geographical size of the districts.
Kristiina Kokko, the party secretary of the National Coalition, reminded YLE that high hidden vote thresholds have been recognised as a problem for decades. Kokko, who chairs the task force appointed to draft the reform, added that the goal is to secure widespread support for the reform across the political spectrum.
“It does feel very challenging to find any kind of solution that’d be acceptable to absolutely everyone,” she conceded.
The task force has yet to agree on one of the most important details, according to the public broadcasting company: how to re-allocate the votes a party received in an electoral region into the electoral districts.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
