The following analysis of the electoral reform process in Bermuda is extracted from a paper by Ron Johnston of the University of Bristol and Clive Payne of Nuffield College, Oxford.

AFTER the Progressive Labour Party's election success in 1998, when it won over half of the votes cast for the first time (it obtained 53.8 per cent and 26 of the 40 Parliamentary seats (its previous best performance had been 18 seats with 46.4 per cent of the votes), it determined to make its proposed changes to the island's constituency boundaries.

The UK Foreign Office asked the Bermuda Government to produce proposals, and the Foreign Office responded by setting up the Bermuda Constituency Boundaries Commission, a six-person bi-partisan commission, whose brief was to prepare and submit to the Governor a report recommending the number, being no fewer than 20 nor greater than 40, and boundaries of constituencies into which Bermuda should be divided with a view to each such constituency returning one member to the House of Assembly.

The Commission was further mandated to ". . . ensure that the constituencies shall contain, so far as is reasonably practicable, equal numbers of persons qualified to be registered as electors . . . and in doing so, to take no account of the racial distribution of electors within Bermuda; to take account of geographical features and natural boundaries within Bermuda; it may ignore the boundaries of parishes; and it must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that each constituency is a contiguous unit".

It was precluded from discussing alternative electoral systems, was required to invite views from the public, and was authorised to seek external advice if required. The Commission comprised two members appointed by the Premier (both of them senior members of the PLP Government), two appointed on the advice of the Opposition Leader (both UBP MPs, including a former Premier), a "judicial member" (Sir Brian Smedley, a retired High Court Judge from the UK who had performed this role on previous Boundary Commissions in Bermuda) and a Chairman (Sir Frank Blackman,a former Secretary to the Cabinet in Barbados, who had chaired a previous Boundary Commission). The Commission was established on 21 August 2001, began work in the following December, and reported in early September 2002. Announcement of the Commission and its terms of reference created considerable interest within Bermuda, with a lobby group, the Association for Due Process & the Constitution, taking the then UK Foreign Secretary (Jack Straw) to the High Court in July 2001 claiming that he should fulfil his 1966 predecessor's promise of a further Constitutional Convention before any electoral reform was introduced.

The court found for the defendant, agreeing with the Crown's case that no legitimate expectation could be founded on the wording of the 1966 report and that subsequent constitutional conferences, constitutional amendments, public debate and consultation about electoral reform had "afforded considerably more opportunity for public debate than would have been possible in any constitutional conference based on the 1966 and 1979 models". It also felt that the second stage of the reform process approval by the UK government provided a safeguard.

The UBP indicated that it was willing to accept the shift to single-member constituencies, so much of the debate focused on the number of seats and their boundaries along with other issues that were outside the Commission's remit, such as whether there should be a separately-elected independent Speaker of the House of Assembly.

The Commission held several public meetings early in 2001 at which these were aired, and written submissions were also made. On the Commission, the main issues related to the number of seats and their boundaries. On the former, there was a clear difference between the parties, with the UBP favouring retention of the status quo and the PLP arguing for a substantial reduction (presumably believing that it would benefit from the votes-into-seats translation process with a smaller number of seats).

But the PLP did not have a preferred number of seats, preferring to link that decision with that on the boundaries: it wished to see maps of proposed constituencies for various numbers of seats before coming to a decision on the size of the House of Assembly.

Eventually the PLP members settled on 32 and the UBP pair on 39. The two independent members of the Commission could have broken this deadlock, but did not do so presumably on the argument that if they did any decision that they imposed (especially if it was close to the UBP's position) would then be rejected in the House of Assembly.

In the interest of reaching unanimity within the Commission, the political members were urged by their colleagues on the Commission to see their way to discharge their duty in the best interests of the country as a whole and to agree among the four of them to one number. The political members were unable, in the initial stages, to reach agreement among themselves. So intense was the desire to reach unanimity on this crucial question, that it was left unresolved until the final session of sittings.

The final decision arrived at was 36. But the Commission offered no rationale for its selection of the particular set of 36 constituencies that it recommended, nor even an indication of how many other configurations of that size it evaluated and rejected. It may have been that they saw only one option generated automatically by the computer software, which cannot evaluate the solutions on the criterion of "taking account of geographical features and natural boundaries": the report does not say. While the debate was continuing over the number of constituencies, so was discussion on their boundaries, and of the role of the parishes in their delimitation. It was clear that, in order to achieve the desired equality of representation, some pairing of parishes would be necessary, with some constituencies crossing parish boundaries.

The Commission was pressed by outside lobby groups to retain the parishes, and was advised that using them (albeit with some pairings) would substantially reduce the complexity of their task and the size of the choice set of possible configurations. However, the Commission determined to operate without deploying the parish boundaries. It used American commercial redistricting software to structure its task. The island was divided into 1,218 polygons with a Geographical Information System, using roads as the boundaries: where these did not reach the coast they were extended to it, so that each had a set of boundaries comprising roads and, in many cases, parts of the island's coastline.

Because all of the addresses on the island's land register are geo-coded, every eligible elector could be placed within one of these polygons. Some of these polygons were then arbitrarily divided because they were too large, in terms of their electorate, to enable the Commission to meet its target that every constituency should be within five per cent of the island average: those arbitrary splits were defined by lines that started and ended at road intersections so that they could be identified on the ground - in some cases, presumably, as potential constituency boundaries. The expanded set of polygons (the report does not give a number) were then used as the building-blocks to create possible constituency configurations, including the finally-chosen set of 36.

The proposed set of constituencies fully met the Commission's mandate that they "contain, so far as is reasonably practicable, equal numbers of persons qualified to be registered as electors". The Commission based its calculations on a potential electorate of 39,168 (as of 20 May, 2002). The average electorate for the proposed 36 constituencies was 1,088, with a range of just 115 (the smallest had 1,031 electors and the largest had 1,148: the standard deviation was just 38).

No constituency electorate deviated from the average by more than 59 (or 5.5 per cent).

Although the Commission had sought views from the public on the general issues that it faced, it did not do so on its recommendations which differs from the situation in the UK, where it is mandatory to seek public representations on provisional recommendations and, if necessary, then hold a public inquiry to hear them in more detail. This was the basis of a dissenting report from one of the UBP Commission members who stated that it would be consistent with the mandate to seek the public's views that members of the public should have had the opportunity to review and comment on the map of 36 constituencies and recommend any changes which they think would improve the positioning of constituencies and placement of boundary lines.

The Boundary Commission's report was debated on the House of Assembly on 11 October, 2002 and its recommendations were unanimously approved. The UBP supported the proposals, but according to The Royal Gazette report of the debate "accused the PLP of polarising the community and causing unnecessary anxiety by railroading the process without proper consultation".

A separate UBP motion to have a referendum on the changes, compulsory re-registration of voters and an independently elected Speaker was voted down. The UK Government, which was sent a transcript of the debate, approved the changes though an Order of Council. Although it did not rule out a constitutional conference to ratify the new electoral system, one was not convened. The initial response to the recommendations, as recorded in the island's newspaper The Royal Gazette (whose general stance appears to be pro-proportional representation) not surprisingly focused on the likely political outcome.

One article reported that Devonshire parish, which was to retain four seats, currently returns two MPs from a UBP stronghold (Devonshire South) and two from a PLP stronghold (Devonshire North): where the boundaries were drawn could upset that balance. The paper posed the question ". . . whether Bermuda wants an electoral system where every single seat is up for grabs, or one in which each party retains some strongholds" and noted that: "While the former of the two systems may seem attractive, it can also lead to dramatic swings from one election to the next, which may reflect majorities on a constituency basis, but fails to represent how the Country voted as a whole. That is the failure of the Westminster system in small countries."

In other words, is the new system more likely to result in a biased outcome than its predecessor? Only time will tell.