Election Day in Malta

People line up to vote, usually in schools transformed into Polling Stations for the day.

Certainly I will never write anything controversial in my blog, and this goes especially where politics is involved. But since this is Election day in my home country of Malta, it happens to be a historic day for me personally as I have not voted since 1976. In fact that was the only time I ever voted in Malta, 41 years ago. Since then I voted many times in the USA, mainly because elections are held annually in November, with the highlight being every 4 years when the Presidential election is held. So I was looking forward to vote in my town of St Julian’s today anytime between 7 AM and 10 AM. Since in the USA, voting is done by mail, I always missed the excitement of going to the polling stations, wait on line, see other people arriving and get involved in the voting process, which is quite complicated here in Malta, especially where the counting of votes is concerned. I was at the Polling Station by 6:30 AM, and voted at 7:10 AM, and I was done in 10 minutes, but enjoyed waiting on line, getting approved, getting the long ballot paper, and vote in secret, as everyone else did.

People line up to vote

The party that gets the most votes will govern for the next 5 years, but the way that candidates are elected is much more complicated, as the proportional system is observed here. So if a candidate gets more votes than the quota needed to be elected for that particular district, the extra votes are given to the person who is given the number 2 vote on a particular ballot. The ballots are very long and can carry as many as 37 names, as was in my district, which included 21 names for one particular party. So a person can vote for 21 candidates or even more, as long as the votes are given in numerical order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Usually 5 candidates are elected from each of the 13 districts. Some are running on 2 districts and are frequently elected on both. This will give way to a casual election, whereby that particular elected member concedes one of the seats and that is given to whoever inherits the most votes from the double-elected member.

The complicated method of counting of votes

The counting of votes is very complicated as each ballot has to be sorted out individually, and counted individually. We were told that as from 2019, the counting will be done electronically, but the voting will be done manually, as has been done for decades. As is the case with the United States, we have two major political parties, the Nationalist party and the Labor party, and they always run neck-and-neck, although in the last election in 2013, there was a difference of 36,000 votes. This election is predicted to be much closer, and the final result will be made know sometime during the day on Sunday. People in Malta take their voting rights very seriously and usually there is over 90% turnout for election voting.