Ley de lemas

The ley de lemas is the Spanish name of the double simultaneous voting (DSV) system which is, or has been, used in elections in Argentina, Uruguay and Honduras. It employs an unusual open party-list proportional representation method, and works as follows:

• Each political party (or coalition, if permitted) is formally termed a lema.
• Each lema might have several sublemas (candidates or lists of candidates). The actual composition of these sublemas can vary: it can be simply a pair of candidates (for election to the posts of governor and vice-governor, for example), or an ordered list of candidates to fill the seats in a legislative body.
• There are no primary elections. Each party can present several sublemas directly to the main election.
• The winning party is the one which receives the most votes after the votes won by each of its sublemas have been added together. Within this party, the winning sublema is the one which, individually, won the most votes. Once the number of votes received by each lema and sublema has been determined, seats or posts are allocated to each proportionally, typically using a system such as the d'Hondt method.

History and use

The Lemas system was designed in 1870 by the Belgian professor Charles Borelli.

Uruguay

The first legislative project supporting it was presented in Uruguay in 1875, but the system was adopted progressively by several modifications and innovations to the electoral law in 1910, 1934, 1935 and 1939. Uruguay still employs it, though the constitutional reform of 1996 has limited its scope to intendent elections.

Honduras

Honduras applied the Ley de Lemas in the 1985 presidential election, when due to factionalism within the two dominant parties both were unable to elect a single presidential candidate.

Argentina

In Argentina, a number of provinces employ or have employed a version of this electoral system: Chubut, Formosa, Jujuy, La Rioja, Misiones, Río Negro, Salta, San Luis, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero, and Tucumán. Provinces have complete freedom to elect local and national representatives using the method of their choice; the system propagates down to the municipal level (except in the hypothetical case of autonomous cities).

The lemas system has never been used in Argentina for a presidential election, though the idea was circulated before the 2003 election.

Support

The Ley de Lemas presents itself as a solution to the problem of fiat selection of candidates performed behind closed doors by party factions. By allowing many candidates to run within the same party and leaving the decision to the citizenry, the system is supposed to end the practice of dark intra-party alliances and add transparency to the conflicts between internal factions. This helps the participation of independent candidates (not backed up by powerful party leaders). It also avoids primary elections (which, in the case of Argentina, have never been practiced widely and typically enjoy very low voter turnout).

Criticism

The party-list proportional representation system works under the assumption that the citizens vote primarily for parties. However, citizens often place emphasis on individual candidates rather than the parties' perceived ideological platforms (this is especially true of Argentina). The diversity of views allowed within a single party means that voters may end up indirectly giving their vote to a candidate that the voters do not really support. A party that decides to present multiple candidates, either with similar of opposing ideologies, may win even if the elected candidate had few votes compared with all the other candidates.

Also, proportional representation system are intended for multiple winners (for example, candidates to fill a legislative chamber); yet the Ley de Lemas has been used to elect presidents, governors and mayors as well.

Problems with the law in Argentina

In Santa Fe

In the province of Santa Fe, where the Ley de Lemas was in force since 1991, it produced three instances of governor elections lost by candidates who had obtained considerably more votes than their immediate rival.

In the 2003 elections, the Socialist candidate Hermes Binner (former mayor of Rosario) got 600,249 votes, while the Justicialist Party (Peronist) candidate Jorge Obeid (former governor and mayor of Santa Fe City), got 345,744 votes. Obeid, however, won the election thanks to the cumulative votes of the other Justicialist sublemas, including the one led by former Socialist Héctor Cavallero.

It also happened in 1991, when Reutemann won the elections with 488.105 votes and 46.8% of votes for Justicialist Party's 17 sublemas, and Horacio Usandizaga got 601.304 votes, but only 40.5% for Unión Cívica Radical's (UCR) 3 sublemas.

In 1995, Usandizaga got 464.270 votes, but the outcome favored Jorge Obeid with 327.706 votes because of 294.497 votes for Héctor Cavallero's sublema.

The proliferation of (mostly opportunistic) sub-lists for legislative posts reached outlandish levels, to the point that 1 voter in 51 was a candidate to some post in some sublema (about 40,000 candidates total).

The law was repealed on 30 November 2004, and replaced by compulsory primary elections followed by a closed-list main election, with proportional representation for legislative elections and first-past-the-post for the executive charges.

In Tucumán

The Ley de Lemas makes it easy to postulate a myriad of candidates, even if they have little representativity, and in fact encourages political parties to do so. In the province of Tucumán, the 2003 election saw a total of 1,800 sublemas (for provincial and municipal executive and legislative posts). More than 50,000 citizens were candidates (1 in 23 eligible voters). As in Santa Fe, this confused the voters and diluted the legitimacy of the candidates, as well as making the vote count an extremely complicated process.

See also

• Politics of Argentina
• Politics of Honduras
• Politics of Uruguay