New electoral law: how preferential votes work with fixed list leaders

An important aspect of the new electoral law is the reintroduction, after 23 years, of preferential voting for the selection of elected representatives. On closer inspection, however, these are only partial preferences, given that the list leaders are fixed and that preferences can only be expressed by ticking a box next to a name – up to a maximum of three, starting from the second candidate on the list – with the requirement to alternate between genders if more than one preference is given.

Preferences will help to determine the candidates elected in the proportional multi-member constituencies, of which there are 49 in the Chamber of Deputies. Voters will see the name of the ‘fixed list leader’ – chosen by the party secretariats – printed at the top of the ballot paper, followed by six other names preceded by a tick: up to three crosses may be marked next to the chosen names, bearing in mind that if more than one preference is indicated, the names must be of different genders. The innovation of using ticks instead of writing out names in full is borrowed from the electoral system currently in force in the region of Tuscany, a system which, however, does not provide for lead candidates: the rationale behind the rule on ‘facilitated preference’ is to eliminate the possibility of manipulating the preference vote through different ways of writing the name (Paolo Rossi, Rossi Paolo, P. Rossi, etc.), a form of manipulation frequently used in the past, particularly in the South.

At the bottom of the ballot paper, voters will also find a further three names: these are the candidates on the so-called ‘long lists’ of 70 Members of Parliament and 35 Senators; these lists only come into effect through the majority bonus awarded to the party that exceeds 42 per cent of the votes, divided amongst the constituency lists comprising three names each. These names appear on the ballot paper purely for information purposes, so to speak, as it is not possible to express preferences from this list of three. And since the law requires that candidates on the ‘listoni’ be nominated as list leaders – (‘the candidate on the constituency lists submitted for the purposes of awarding the governability bonus……is a candidate in at least one multi-member constituency as the lead candidate, or in positions following that of the lead candidate, provided that all candidates preceding them on the same multi-member constituency list are also candidates on the constituency lists submitted for the purposes of allocating the governability bonus’) - the conclusion is that the voter will generally find at least one name repeated towards the bottom of the ballot paper.

But are these genuine preferences, or is it ‘a scam’, as the opposition claims? Given that small and medium-sized parties such as Forza Italia, the Lega and Avs will almost exclusively elect their list leaders, it can be estimated that those elected specifically by voters through their preference votes will account for between 30 and 40 per cent at most in the next Parliament, essentially riding on the coattails of the larger parties: Fratelli d’Italia, the PD and, to some extent, the M5S.

The 40/60 gender quota applies to the lists as a whole but not to the list leaders: a shortcoming that will certainly have a negative impact on the representation of women. In truth, the absence of gender quotas for list leaders is partly offset by the 40/60 quotas in the so-called ‘long lists’ of 70 deputies and 35 senators that are triggered by the majority bonus: candidates on constituency-level ‘long lists’ must, as mentioned above, be list leaders in multi-member constituencies or second on the list behind another candidate on the ‘long lists’ in the event of multiple candidacies.