Election Monitor

Tomorrow Cindy and I will be going out as part of the Embassy election monitoring mission.  Our team is me, Cindy, and Bruna.  Our assignment is the Central Election Commission here in Tirana.  It is not a polling place, but they will collect results.  Its main function is to set the rules and rule on disputes and answer questions from poll workers around the country.  Other teams left today for cities around the country.  I think we have about 15 teams.  They will be going to actual voting places.  It should be interesting.

Here people vote for the party, not a person.  Albania is divided up into 12 voting districts.  Each district has so many representatives alloted by population.  The biggest and smallest are Tirana with 32 and Kukes with 4.  There are 140 seats in Parliament.  There are 33 (I think) parties on the ballot.  A party has to get at least 5% of the votes in a district to qualify for a seat.  Most of the 33 parties will not have a representative.  In order to have some influence, though, many of the smaller parties enter into a coalition with a larger party.  There are 4 parties in the SP and DP coalitions.  They're the two big ones.  There are two other coalitions, but I'm not sure how many parties.  In each district the parties list the names of prospective members of parliament from one to whatever.  In Kukes there may be five and in Tirana maybe 40.  Then after it is determined how many seats each party gets the MPs will be named.  The tricky and horsetrading nature of it all is that a party can give a percentage to another party.  So say if the SP has 34.5% in Tirana, and it takes 32 % for 17 seats, they are going to waste 2.5%.  If their coalition partner G99 has 3.2, SP can give 1.8 to G99 so they can meet the 5% requirement and get a seat, and the coalition will have 18 instead of 17.  This goes on in all 11 districts.  These deals are not a matter of law but of whatever the coalition agreed/agrees on.  So, as I say, it should be interesting.