Podbit · Jon Mallia Podcast

IS-SISTEMA ELETTORALI #1

Explore episode May 27, 2026

Government

Donkey Voting and Block Voting: The Hidden Distortions in STV

IS-SISTEMA ELETTORALI #1 · May 27, 2026 Government

Malta's STV ballot asks voters to number candidates in order of preference across an entire district list. Many voters simply vote 1,2,3,4,5 straight down the party list — 'donkey voting' or 'block voting'. This gives a massive, unintentional advantage to candidates who appear at the top of the printed list, distorting the outcome in ways most voters never realise.

Where this was said

Comparative Electoral Systems: France, UK and Coalition Dynamics

At 1:58:00 · chapter starts 1:48:20

David Grech uses the 2022 French presidential election — where Macron took 27% and Le Pen 24% in the first round before a two-candidate runoff — to illustrate how the two-round system can produce governments with ambiguous mandates. He contrasts this with the UK's FPTP, where Johnson's 2019 majority was built on a similar minority share of the eligible electorate. Malta's STV, he argues, is actually better at capturing voter preference across the spectrum than either of these systems — but its design flaw is the district-level implementation, which requires geographic concentration of votes that third parties rarely achieve. He also revisits the coalition kingmaker dynamic, noting that in proportional systems like the Netherlands or Belgium, a small party holding 8–10% of seats can veto government policy — a power that is democratically problematic in a different way from Malta's two-party lock. Jon ends this section by asking whether there is any electoral system that doesn't systematically disadvantage some group of voters, and David's answer is characteristically data-grounded: every system encodes a trade-off, and the task is to be honest about which trade-off your system makes.

It was a protest vote. But the protest vote never became anything. Nobody followed up. Next time round, what do you think those voters do?

David Grech

IS-SISTEMA ELETTORALI #1

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