Your views

Dear Sir,
I fear that Andrew Ede is being somewhat ingenuous in telling us that he doesn’t understand the election system that has given rise to the make-up of Majorca’s councils. (The Week That Was – Sunday).  I am quite sure he is well aware of how the party-list proportional representation system works.
  I am not so confident of his understanding of  how the Duckworth-Lewis system works in cricket.  That really is a wonder of arcana to behold.  The way Majorca’s voting system works is a model of transparency by comparison.
It can seem strange to those used to the first-past-the-post, British system,  where people vote for the candidate as much as for the Party but it has the signal benefit of being much fairer and produces a result more representative of the votes cast.  It is subject to the odd glitch.  Because it has a slight bias toward larger parties, smaller parties may just fail to get a large enough vote to obtain a seat.  In the 2011 Calvia Council election just under 25% of the valid vote was divided among so many small parties that none got a seat.
Still, when you look at the result of the recent British General Election under first-past-the-post and compare it with the result under Majorca’s d’Hondt system of proportional representation it is clear which one responds best to the voters’ intentions.  
For example, UKIP polled just less than 3.9 million votes and got one seat.  The Scottish National Party polled just less than 1.5 million votes and got 56 seats.  There was worse.  The Liberal Democrats polled slightly more than 2.4 million votes and got 8 seats and the Democratic Unionist Party got the same number of seats for slightly more than 184 thousand votes.
So, be grateful Andrew for the small mercy of fairness that is the d’Hondt system even if you’re not too happy with the outcome it provided this time.  Whatever administrations are cobbled together among the parties I have no doubt that they will do a reasonable job on our behalf.  The man you tend to describe as Joserra may be saying on behalf of the PP, “après nous le déluge”,  but that expresses nothing more than the chagrin of the loser.
Jim Wallace
 Cala Viñas