The electoral reform initiative of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador states that all deputies and senators become plurinominal, namely, they would not reach Congress with the direct vote of the citizensRather, they would be elected by the total number of votes obtained by the lists proposed by the political parties.
Contrary to what the president affirms about the elimination of multi-members, his proposal proposes that the deputies no longer compete in the 300 districts that the country currently has, but rather – without the need to campaign – to win they would only need to be in the first places from a list.
Nowadays, every time there are elections to renew the Chamber of Deputies (every three years), you have the possibility of voting directly in your district for the legislator of your choice. Obviously this has to campaign in your district. The direct vote of the citizens also serves to elect the president.
On the other hand, what López Obrador’s electoral reform initiative proposes would take away that possibility, since the deputies would no longer win with the vote of the citizens of a districtbut as a whole they would reach the lower house depending on the global sum of votes obtained by the lists that the parties will make.
In order to understand this better, we can give the following example: Imagine that on the street where you live, three representatives have to be elected. In your street there are 10 houses and each family head is launched as a candidate.
All citizens of legal age who are part of that street have 10 options to elect their three representatives by direct vote, therefore, of the 10 candidates, the three who obtain the most votes will win, and these will be from three different houses. This is how today we elect 300 deputies.
With the electoral reform of the president, you could no longer vote for three of those 10 candidates directly, but each house would propose a list of candidates. Continuing with the example, each of the 10 houses would make a list that would include the father of the family, the mother, the children, and even the grandparents.
The residents of your street would have to vote for the lists, and not for individual candidates. Thus, the list of a single house can win the global representation of all the neighbors, without the need for you to have voted for a candidate, but you would have to vote for the complete list of each house, although some of the members of the same you don’t like it very much.
Thus, the list system with which the 300 deputies would be elected, all plurinominal, will only benefit a dominant party, and not as it happens now that in a single federal entity there can be deputies from different parties, because they are elected in different districts.
This is so because the 300 legislators would not be elected in the same number of districts, but by a list that each party will prepare with the number of seats that correspond to each state depending on its population.
Nowadays in each entity of the country there are several districts, the winning candidates of each district can be indistinctly from any political party. Thus, for example, in Mexico City, there are districts that the PAN wins, and others in which Morena wins; In Jalisco -to give another example- there are districts in which the Citizen Movement triumphs, and others in which the deputy who reaches the lower house is from Morena, the PRI or the PAN.
In contrast, the reform proposes that there are no longer districts, but that -uniformly- all the voters of an entity vote for the candidates of a certain party. The number of candidates will depend on the population of the state.
lesser representation
In the initiative of the president it is clarified that, according to the number of inhabitants, in Aguascalientes only 3 deputies can be elected; while in Chiapas there will be 13, in Mexico City 22; in the State of Mexico 40; in Jalisco 20; in Guanajuato 15; in Nuevo León 14, etc. The number of seats would be determined according to the population of each state reported in the Census of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
Following what the proposal says, each political party must make a list of only three candidates in Aguascalientes. In the elections, the voters of that entity would no longer vote by districts, but would only have to choose the list of those three candidates, either from one party or another, and so on in the other states of the country.
with this system opportunities for opposition parties to win a seat are reduced, and at the same time a partisan majority would be created in the Chamber of Deputies that would not reflect the political plurality of the states, ergo what is being attempted is to once again create a hegemonic party that dominates in Congress, as happened for more than 70 years. years with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Reduction of legislators
It is true that the reform proposed by the president attempts to reduce the number of deputies from 500 to 300, but those that would remain – it must be insisted – would all be multi-member, voted by lists and not by direct voting in each district, since the districts they would also disappear to be replaced by state constituencies.
A decrease is also proposed for the Senate: The upper house would go from 128 to 96 members, who would be elected as deputies through the list system in each state.
Today, every six years, we elect two senators for each state in the country. In other words, 64 senators occupy their seats because the citizens voted directly for them.
Then the second place candidates also become senators, guaranteeing the plurality of the voters, thus adding another 32 legislators to that sovereignty. The remaining 32 senators, to complete the current 128, are multi-member, and reach the Senate through the list system.
The presidential initiative that would reform our election system says verbatim that “the Senate of the Republic will be made up of 96 senators – three from each state – also elected by list.” This means that nor can senators be directly elected, instead, the winners would reach the upper house depending on the global list of a single party.
In short, in reality, the reform of the president intends to reduce the democratic options that we have today, since it attempts to eliminate our right to vote directly for the candidate of our choice.
MORE NEWS:
Surya Palacios Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal analysis and human rights. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.