Introduction
We live in a legal limbo, because in more than forty years we have not been able to approve an electoral law specific to Catalonia, and this means that we operate with certain rules regarding the election of political representation in the Parliament of Catalonia, and to the exercise of derived functions, which probably correspond little to the present times. We continue with the in-person vote, or with a burdensome process for the postal vote and an ignominious Via Crucis regarding the vote of Catalans living abroad, in the age of technology and artificial intelligence. Perhaps we could make progress on the issue of electronic voting, as long as all the security measures have been verified as true and without loopholes.
The current electoral system
We have, as of now, an electoral law that was designed to strengthen the role of political parties, which were certainly weak structures at the end of the 70s and beginnings of the 80s of the last century. This involved opting for the establishment of closed lists, where the voter must accept all the names, without any possibility of interference, because any action in this regard condemns the ballot cast to be considered a null vote. These closed lists, which make it impossible for the voter to make any kind of choice, coexist with the legal fiction that the seat belongs to the member of parliament who has been lucky or has done everything possible to be part of a list. I say luck, even if primary systems have formally been established, because those who are interested in political action know the power of party apparatuses and the bread that is given to them, despite all the exceptions that certainly someone can claim
A new perspective
I would like to point out that we have been without our own electoral law for more than forty years. Then we find ourselves with the shocking situation that a voter has been pushed to vote for a certain list, complete and unpolluted, in accordance with his ideas or as a lesser evil, given the rest of the candidates, but that if a member of the list decides to abandon the discipline of the parliamentary group to which he had voluntarily joined, for whatever reasons, that deputy will continue to represent (supposedly) the will of his voters, even if those who voted for him or her consider that no longer represents them, due to the parliamentary actions or votes it exercises, either by action or by omission.
A proposal for change
In life, in general, I have always found it difficult to live in the realm of fiction, but in the realm of political action it seems even more dangerous. With the current electoral system, if one does not agree with the postulates and actions of that political force that has welcomed it in its lists, it seems to me that it would be good to reflect and honestly leave the seat to someone who be able to defend them. Because I’ve always believed that the person driving on a freeway in the opposite direction is not usually right, no matter how much he believes it. And because being able to congratulate yourself for observing principles of ethical action would be comforting.
A new vision of the electoral system
However, this is not the main problem. It seems to me, in this sense, that we should move towards a system of nominal election by constituency and in two rounds. Everyone needs to be able to know the name of the deputy who represents them, and that he or she is chosen by an absolute or sufficiently qualified majority of their voters. It also seems to me that given the territorial structure and the demographic composition that exists in Catalonia, we should move towards a dual system of representation. One ballot box for the uninominal electoral constituency scrutiny, based on the county division and the representation of the districts of the city of Barcelona, and another based on a single national constituency, with lists of the different parties and proportional scrutiny. It seems to me that this mixed system would favor stronger and more representative governments and make the vast majority of citizens feel better represented.
conclusion
But it is not the proposal of an electoral system that I am interested in highlighting today. What I would like to highlight is that we have been without our own electoral law for more than forty years and it is a subject that I do not hear much about, nor do many proposals arrive, even if there is some flare-up intermittently. It is a complex subject, which needs a certain grandeur and abstraction. Greatness and abstraction are difficult principles to combine in the perspective of an upcoming electoral contest. And since there are often…
