Macharia Gaitho
12 October 2008
column
Nairobi — Kenyans were mystified recently when in a lightning coup, South Africa's ruling African National Congress ousted state President Thabo Mbeki.
That was possible because in the country's hybrid political system, the president is not directly elected by the people, but is merely the nominee of the party that controls the legislature.
Once Mr Mbeki's bitter rival, former Deputy President Jacob Zulu, captured control of ANC at the party elections earlier this year, the writing was on the wall for the state president.
Many other countries, including Britain and other countries that operate the parliamentary system, also have a head of government elected by the legislature, so the job goes to the leader of the party of the coalition of parties that command the majority of seats.
In such systems it usually means a change does not have to await a general election, but can be forced anytime there is a shift in the balance if power in the House, or when the majority party or coalition decides to make a change.
In Kenya during the constitution review debate, there was robust push for a parliamentary system in which the Head of Government would be a Prime Minister leaving the President as a ceremonial Head of State.
But few realised that if the system was adopted, Kenyan voters would lose the right elect their chief executive, a right entrenched in the Constitution since adoption attainment of the republican system in 1964.
Instead, it would be Parliament that would elect the head of government.
Right now the eyes of the world are on the United States and Kenyans, like people everywhere else, are keeping a close watch on the battle for the White House between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.
All are keeping a close watch on the opinion poll figures being released almost daily, and excitement is rising by the day as a win by a "fellow Kenyan" seems more and more likely.
Mr Obama may be leading the popular vote by all opinion polls, but the US presidential election system also has its own quirks; the popular vote does not count.
Many might still recall 2000 when George Bush won a disputed and bitterly contested election over former Vice President Al Gore. In the election seen as the epitome of electoral rigging in the US, Mr Gore won the national popularity contest with 50,999,897 votes ahead of Mr Bush with 50,456,002 votes.
Mr Bush was declared elected as president. But the reason why there were widespread cries of foul was not because of the way the popular vote had gone, but because of the suspected malpractices that handed him victory in the State of Florida.
That happened because in the US it is not the popular vote that counts but the number of delegates one secures.
In the US the president is not elected by the people, but 538 delegates to an electoral college. In that year Mr Bush got a razor-thin majority of 271 electoral college votes to Mr Gore's 266.
270--just over half the total number of delegates who carry one vote each--is the magic number in electoral college votes a presidential candidate aims for.
Current polls in the US show Mr Obama increasing the gap on Mr McCain, with some even suggesting what in ordinary circumstances would be an unassailable double-digit lead approaching a dozen percentage points.
Yet while the figures might certainly be impressive, the American campaigns are based not so much on courting the national constituency, as might be witnessed with the nationally-televised debates, but the grassroots effort that secures victory in individual states.
Mr Obama and Mr McCain may be covered every day on national television, but the real work is being done in small towns across the country where the effort is at reaching uncommitted voters and securing key states.
With only a couple of exceptions, the electoral delegates format is a winner-take all system where the candidate who scrapes through in for example, Ohio, with just over 51 percent of the popular vote in the state, gets all 20 of the delegates in that state.
That was why Florida was so important in 2000 - it decided the presidential election after George Bush was declared to have won the state in highly contentious circumstances, and with that Florida's 27 electoral college votes.
How the system works
When one votes for a presidential candidate, it is really an instruction to the delegates, or electors, in that state to cast their votes for the same candidate.
So if one votes for McCain-Palin, for example, one is actually voting for an elector who will be "pledged" to vote for the Republican ticket. The candidate who wins the popular vote in a state wins all the pledged votes of the state's electors.
Each state gets a number of electors equal to its number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. Senators. The District of Columbia gets three electors. How the electors themselves are chosen is determined at the local level by State laws.
Each elector gets one vote, thus Florida gets 27 votes, Ohio 20 votes and a state such as Nevada with five electors gets five votes.
The electors are bound, by law and convention, to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in their state when they meet to elect the president.
The Electoral College is based on proportional representation, so that states with bigger populations get more votes.
The state with the highest number of electors is California with 55, followed by Texas with 34 ands New York with 31.
The lowest are District of Columbia, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Wyoming, Vermont, South Dakota and North Dakota, with three electoral votes each.
The system has its problems. One is the likelihood, though rare, of a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the election as happened with Al Gore in 2000.
That has happened only two previous instances in other times in US history: In 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but his Republican opponent Rutherford Hayes was elected president. In 1888 another Democrat Grover Cleveland was the peoples' choice, but the election went to Republican Benjamin Harrison.
It is in fact possible for a candidate to win presidency by ignoring the popular vote and putting all his money and energy in securing just 12 of the most populous states, that together have more than the required 270 electoral college votes.
In the run-up to Kenya's 2007 elections, President Kibaki strategy was based largely on ignoring opposition zones and securing his highly populated strongholds in central Kenya, and then looking for the uncommitted vote in a few key regions to swing the election.
A parallel could probably be drawn with some of the numbers from Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election. President Kibaki of PNU retained office with a tiny majority of just 231,728 votes over his main challenger Raila Odinga of ODM.
One of the main arguments advanced by ODM in rejecting the results was that it could not have lost the presidential vote, because it clearly beat PNU in the number of elected MPs.
But the argument failed to take into account that PNU performed poorly in the parliamentary races because in many constituencies it fielded multiple candidates competing against each other and thus splitting the pro-Kibaki vote to the advantage of the ODM candidates.
Another factor was the make up of constituency boundaries in ways that do not reflect equal representation.
There are constituencies with over 100,000 voters and some constituencies with less than 20,000 voters, yet all rate a single voice in parliament despite the constitutional requirement that constituencies be nearly equal in number of voters.
What happens in the US in case of a tie at the Electoral College? Then the election is settled by the House of Representatives.
The combined representatives of each state get one vote and a simple majority of states is required to win. This has only happened twice. Presidents Thomas Jefferson in 1801 and John Quincy Adams in 1825 were elected by the House of Representatives.
Americans will cast their ballots on Tuesday November 4. But the country has so many time zones that while voting is still taking place in the western states like California, voting in New York and other eastern states will already have ended, the votes counted and from exit polls TV stations will already have started declaring the winners.
By midnight in the west the result might already be clear and one candidate might have declared victory and the other will have conceded.
But it will not be until nearly a month and a half later, December 15 (By law the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), when the actual electors, delegates to the Electoral College, meet in their respective state capitals to vote for the president and vice president.
The long gap between is because in the 1800s it took much longer to count the popular vote and also a long time for all the electors reach their state capitals. Today the time lag is convenient for settling any disputes.
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