Cross-party vote transfers do occur in Malta's STV system but are relatively rare; in close district races they can be the decisive factor in who takes the final seat.
Where this was said
At 37:10 · chapter starts 35:00
David Grech reconstructs the 1981 general election in vivid detail. The Nationalist Party won a plurality of national votes, yet because of how electoral districts were drawn and how the STV count distributed seats at district level, Labour ended up with a majority of parliamentary seats and formed the government. This outcome — winning more votes yet losing power — exposed a fundamental flaw in how Malta had configured its electoral system, and it triggered years of political tension including PN boycotts of parliament. David explains how gerrymandering — the deliberate manipulation of district boundaries — interacted with STV's district-level arithmetic to produce the anomaly. He also discusses the 1987 constitutional amendment negotiated between the parties to ensure such an outcome could never repeat: the popular-vote winner would always receive enough bonus seats to hold a majority, regardless of how the district-level counts fell. Jon notes that this solution resolved the immediate problem but created a new constraint: it cemented the two-party system by making it structurally impossible for any third force to become a coalition kingmaker.
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