THE new States will decide later this year whether to consider island-wide voting.
Results of a Guernsey Press-commissioned survey by islandopinion.com revealed the majority of islanders back its introduction and were unhappy with the current district-based system.
The House Committee will include the findings in its investigations into how the States should be elected in future. The committee’s principal officer, David Robilliard (pictured), said that with this election out the way, he would be able to devote more time to research and drafting an initial report.
Ultimately, however, it will be down to the new political board to decide what direction it takes.
‘We’ve done quite a bit of consultation so far with the public and States members, but I appreciate some of that will need to be revisited because we have new deputies,’ said Mr Robilliard.
A report on the general principles will go to the States in September or October setting out various options and the pros and cons of those.
These will probably range from retaining the status quo to island-wide voting for all 45 deputies and various options in between.
The States debate and public airing will then form the basis for another report with firm propositions to be debated in 2009.
This projected time scale would mean that if the States did back island-wide voting, the necessary legislation would be in place in time for the 2012 election.
The islandopinion.com survey showed that 61% supported island-wide voting for all 45 deputies, 59% for selecting the chief minister, 33% for the Policy Council and 30% for a new level of about 10 island-wide deputies.
* No figures are available to show how many 16-year-olds took up their right to vote. In the UK, the ages of people signed up to the electoral roll are collected because it forms the basis of selecting people for jury service. But as this does not apply in Guernsey, the ages were not recorded.
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I have to confess to being an ‘outsider’, a Guernseyman by birth and upbringing now living in England but continuing to take a lively interest in the Island. If Guernsey is going to think again about its system of election it really should abandon the system where each voter can have multiple votes in a ‘first-past-the-post’ election. There are several problem with this system but the main one is that most voters don’t realise that if they have two people whom they really want to have elected, then every other vote they cast potentially counts *against* their favoured candidate! In this election, like the last one, the results in every district show signs of candidates being successful or unsuccessful more or less at random - not following the will of the voters. The ideal system for the Island would be the Single Transferable Vote (which could safely be Island-wide) as used in Ireland and in Scotland for local government elections. If you’d like further details they can be found at http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk.