The Head Heeb

Papua New Guinea is now in the fourth day of an 11-day general election, with voting staggered across provinces for logistic and security reasons. When the dust clears, voters will elect 109 members of parliament, of whom the 20 who successfully compete for the at-large provincial seats will also become governors. The poll is widely looked on as a test, both of the new limited preferential voting system and the security forces' ability to prevent electoral violence.

The good news, thus far, is that the widespread violence that marked the 2002 vote has been largely absent, and the authorities have been able to handle bad weather and supply glitches. The bad news is that a purge of fraudulent names earlier this year left many real voters missing from the rolls, resulting in an unknown number of citizens being disenfranchised and raising the specter of legal challenges to the results. And despite the lack of pitched battles, observers have reported significant intimidation and fraud:

About 2000 police and soldiers have been deployed to the Southern Highlands, where polls in six of nine electorates were declared invalid in the 2002 election due to widespread violence, gunpoint intimidation and vote rigging. [...] Police reported largely peaceful voting in the province.

But at Koroba in the province's northwest, police were sent in to deal with unruly voters, lashing out with lengths of cable to restore order, an official said. In the Western Highlands, Governor and former prime minister Paias Wingti received a cut on his forehead after he was stoned by a rival candidate's supporters at a rally at Minj.

Near the provincial capital Mt Hagen, supporters of one candidate set up a roadblock to stop the passage of Southern Highlanders who they suspected of coming across to vote against their candidate after already voting in their own province. Vehicles were stoned but Commissioner Baki arrived and personally intervened to negotiate lifting the roadblock.

Mr Baki said today that in one Southern Highlands polling area, stacks of fraudulently filled out ballot papers were seized by police and would be disqualified. One ballot box stolen by a gang of men at Hides had been recovered and would also be disqualified.

The results, which are expected to trickle in over the next few days, will determine whether new-old prime minister Michael Somare wins another term. They may also determine, once the fraud is filtered out, whether the preferential voting system succeeds in breaking political monopolies. First-past-the-post elections in PNG, as in the Solomons, tend to have one of two outcomes: easy victory by a local "big man," or competition between a crowded field with the winner chosen largely by chance. A number of successful candidates in the last election scored less than 20 percent of the vote and won with very narrow majorities, with the Goilala Open winner taking 7.7 percent to beat the runner-up by 11 votes.

Such candidates can't be said to represent their districts in any meaningful sense, and their success makes PNG a doubtful democracy. The haphazard results have diminshed the already-slim chance of creating a national party system, and governments tend to be based on post-election deals between MPs without regard to the voters. The voters can punish a bad representative, but can't really use their votes to support any kind of national policy or ideological program. The relatively narrow margins also put a premium on mobilizing core supporters and shutting down opposing voters, making violence a useful tactic and favoring candidates with strong clan support.

One of the hopes put forward for the new system is that it will make more votes count, force candidates to broaden their appeal, and permit voters to give their second and third preferences to candidates with good policy programs even if they feel obligated to give their first preferences to clan leaders. In the few by-elections held under the LPV system thus far, the results have been mixed. On the one hand, violence has decreased and electoral winners have had more convincing majorities. On the other hand, the three-preference limit means that candidates can still win with the support of a quarter of the electorate, and family ties remain important in deciding the winners. In a few days we'll know how these trends play out at the national level, and how much of a democracy PNG has become.