MGLE01: IFES DELEGATION ON LEBANON'S ELECTORAL LAW

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 BEIRUT 000953

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

NSC FOR ABRAMS/DORAN/WERNER/SINGH
DEPT FOR NEA - DAS DIBBLE AND DAS CARPENTER
DEPT ALSO FOR NEA/ELA, NEA/PI - KIRBY, AND DRL - BIRKLE

E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/24/2016
TAGS: PGOV KDEM KMPI SOCI LE
SUBJECT: MGLE01: IFES DELEGATION ON LEBANON'S ELECTORAL LAW

REF: BEIRUT 844

BEIRUT 00000953 001.2 OF 004


Classified By: Ambassador Jeffrey D. Feltman for reason 1.4 (d)

SUMMARY
--------------


1. (C) A team of IFES experts visiting Beirut told us that
the national commission charged with reforming the electoral
law appears to have come up with a progressive,
reform-oriented draft. They said that the recent impasse
over districting should not distract Lebanese from the fact
that "80 percent of the law is very good." They worried,
however, that technical shortcomings in key areas, including
the framework of a proportional representation system and an
independent electoral commission, might wind up defeating the
purpose of electoral reform. Still, with committed
technical support from the international community and
Lebanese NGOs, it would be possible to rectify many of the
initial draft's apparent weaknesses. This cable reviews some
of IFES's concerns about the draft law's potential technical
problems. IFES will release a full report on their visit to
Beirut in the coming week. End summary.

DRAFT LAW: "80 PERCENT" IS "VERY GOOD"
--------------


2. (C) On March 18, emboffs called on a visiting team of
IFES electoral experts at IFES's new office in Beirut.
Present were Peter Erben, IFES's deputy director for
post-conflict electoral programs; Jared Blanc, IFES country
director for the West Bank and Gaza; IFES consultant Ben
Goldsmith; Beirut chief of party Hermann Thiel; and
Beirut-based media and election specialist Monique de Groot.
Erben led an IFES team to Beirut to discuss Lebanon's draft
electoral law with commission members, GOL officials, and
Lebanon's NGO community.


3. (C) Overall, IFES reported that the draft law was a good
start. Although they had not seen any working drafts of the
electoral law, they felt they had a fairly detailed
understanding of the law's major provisions from their
meetings with commission members and other NGO technical
advisors. The recent, politically-charged impasse over
districting -- which saw two commission members resign -- did
not detract from the fact that "80 percent of the law is very
good," Erben said. Nothing in it was fundamentally wrong.

WORKING PAST "ARROGANCE" AND AROUND THE "VACUUM"
-------------- ---


4. (C) Seeing Lebanon at "pivotal point" for changing its
current "weak" electoral system, the IFES experts expressed
concern that the draft law's provisions in several important
areas had technical shortcomings. These shortcomings could
undermine the drafters' original intent, they said. The
shortcomings stemmed from the fact that the national
electoral reform commission is composed almost entirely of
lawyers without any experience in electoral systems, and
because the UN had limited the commission's access to
technical assistance and research during the drafting
process.


5. (C) The IFES experts expressed particular concern about
the commission's guidelines for setting up a proportional
electoral system (described in further detail below). These
would, perversely enough, retain the major shortcomings of
the current majoritarian system. That is, they would limit
access to independent political movements and lock in the
dominance of Lebanon's reigning sectarian bosses (Hizballah,
Aoun, Jumblatt, Hariri, etc.)


6. (C) Blanc said that one problem he and his colleagues
encountered in nearly all of their discussions was "the
arrogance that develops when people work on something in
isolation over a long period of time without considering any
of the practical implications." He cited the impasse over
districting as a case in point. He said the Lebanese have
been looking at their electoral system for a while, but
various sectarian groups have been doing it in isolation from
one another, and none of them have consulted outside experts.
"So they think they know everything, but they've actually
included some very dangerous provisions," said Blanc.

BEIRUT 00000953 002.2 OF 004



UN COMES IN FOR CRITICISM
--------------


7. (C) The IFES experts also had some criticism for the UN.
They complained that a needlessly "stubborn" UNDP, as the
umbrella authority for the technical secretariat charged with
providing expert and research assistance to the national
commission on electoral reform, had kept Lebanese and
international election experts from contacting commission
members, while providing minimal assistance themselves.
Rather than staking out the area of technical assistance to
the commission as UN turf and then providing that technical
assistance, "they established a vacuum and then defended it,"
said Blanc. As a result, commission members did not have
access to what they needed when drafting some of the
electoral law's more difficult provisions.


8. (C) The next several paragraphs detail IFES's concerns on
what appear to them to be the draft law's main technical
shortcomings in its plans for a proportional representation
system, an independent electoral commission, voter
registration, dispute resolution, and a women's quota.

PROPORTIONALITY AND THRESHOLDS
--------------


9. (C) New districting plans under a proportional
representational system were the source of a fallout among
commission members and the resignation of the commission's
two Maronite members, Ziad Baroud and Michel Tabet. Blanc
said that there were two likely motivating factors for
widespread Christian, particularly Maronite, unhappiness with
the districting proposals. First, there was a lack of
understanding of proportional representation itself. Even
more importantly, it was not well understood how a
proportional electoral system would change the behavior,
organization, and outlook of Lebanon's voters and the
politicians.


10. (C) The second factor, according to Blanc, was an even
more important cause of Christian rejectionism, and more
serious. He said that Christians are interested in the
symbolism of maximized Christian districts, regardless of
technical considerations. Christians seem to want to draw as
many Christian-majority electoral districts as possible, as a
way of riding out the demographic decline that they
anticipate for their community in future years and decades.
(Comment: From this point of view, more and smaller
electoral districts are better. Christian anxiety about
demographic decline is widespread, even if the available data
do not justify it -- see reftel. End comment.)


11. (C) Blanc said, for example, that there is very little
difference between the two proposals recently under the
commission's consideration, one dividing Lebanon into nine
electoral districts, the other into 13. Christian
pluralities would be able to elect about 56 of the 64
Christian-designated seats under either system. The current
impasse is the result of Christian insistence on symbolic
dominance, which the 13-district scheme offers and the
nine-district scheme does not.


12. (C) An even greater concern, for the IFES experts, was
the minimum threshold of votes that the national electoral
reform commission is considering setting. According to
Blanc, the commission has decided that, in the proposed
proportional system, a list of parliamentary candidates must
win at least 10 percent of the overall vote in order for any
of its members to be elected.


13. (C) Ten percent is a relatively quite high threshold.
It would create a high barrier to the entry of smaller,
emerging parties (the ones most likely to cross traditional
lines of confessional identity and clientelism) and cement
the hold of the reigning large political blocs over Lebanese
politics. Blanc said that a threshold of five percent would
be much more reasonable. He noted that, in Iraq's recent
elections, a threshold of only 0.36 percent managed to
eliminate some 50 percent of the candidates.

INDEPENDENT ELECTORAL COMMISSION
--------------

BEIRUT 00000953 003.4 OF 004




14. (C) Erben and Blanc applauded the national electoral
reform commission's goal of creating an independent
commission to oversee future Lebanese elections. At the same
time, they worried that not enough thought has gone into the
administrative and managerial support that such an
independent commission would require. Blanc said that, based
on conversations with national electoral reform commission
members, he and his colleagues feared that the independent
electoral commission lacked a precise mandate, as well as the
fiscal and legal independence and administrative tools needed
to carry that mandate out.


15. (C) As envisioned in the current draft law, the
independent electoral commission will only "borrow" its staff
from the government bureaucracy, mostly the ministries of
Justice and Interior. It would also have insufficient
administrative support, with no more than five full-time
staffers. It would not have personnel to monitor elections,
and its budget would be subject to manipulation by the GOL.
This lack of a clear mandate, adequate resources, and
organizational structure would cripple the independent
electoral commission, according to the IFES experts.


16. (C) Thiel said the independent electoral commission
would need a guaranteed annual budget. Otherwise, it can be
turned off and shut down at any time, at the whim of the
president, prime minister, or speaker of Parliament. Blanc
noted that these were largely organizational shortcomings,
however, which he and his colleagues hoped to address in
"Phase II" of the electoral law reform process (which begins
after the national electoral reform commission submits a
draft law to the prime minister).


17. (C) The IFES team emphasized that the independent
electoral commission would potentially be the most important
aspect of the new electoral law. To date, however, it has
received little detailed attention from the law's drafters.
Regardless of the other improvements in the electoral law, if
the independent electoral commission fails in its mission to
run transparent, open elections, the validity of any reforms
would be called into question. The IFES experts noted that,
as elections became more genuinely competitive, an
independent electoral commission falls under ever greater
scrutiny.

VOTER REGISTRATION
--------------


18. (C) In Lebanon's electoral system, voters register in
their ancestral home or village, rather than their current
place of residence. IFES consultant Ben Goldsmith said that
this issue is a Pandora's box, which may burst open if the
commission does not first address some of the pressures and
inequalities in the current system. Currently, Goldsmith
said, the Ministry of Interior maintains voter registration
lists and maintains a strict cap on the number of individuals
it permits to change their official residence every year.


19. (C) Goldsmith said that the current system has two major
shortcomings. First, the current registration system,
maintained by the Interior Ministry, is non-transparent.
Responsibility for voter registration should be given to the
proposed independent electoral commission, which would
require permanent administrative support to manage voter
lists.


20. (C) Second, the current system encourages clientelism.
Voters often have to travel across Lebanon -- from where they
actually live to where they are registered -- in order to
vote. Candidates and parties will often provide
transportation, food, and financial remuneration to make sure
that voters get to the polling place -- and that, once there,
they vote for the "right" list of candidates.


21. (C) Another factor to consider, Goldsmith said, is the
impact of expatriate voting. If expatriate voters remain
registered in their ancestral homes in Lebanon, Goldsmith
estimated that they could determine the outcome of as many as
50 parliamentary seats in the next election. The national
electoral reform commission has not yet taken into
consideration the logistical requirements for running
expatriate voting. Their current plan -- to run expatriate

BEIRUT 00000953 004.2 OF 004


votes through Lebanese embassies and consulates -- is
impractical, according to Goldsmith.

DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND THE WOMEN'S QUOTA
--------------


22. (C) Two final areas for consideration, according to the
IFES experts, include the draft law's mechanism for resolving
disputed elections and ensuring female representation in
Parliament.


23. (C) Blanc noted that, currently under Lebanese law,
disputed election results are reviewed by the Constitutional
Court, which has itself been the subject of recent political
battles and charges of partiality. While complaints over
disputed election results have to be filed with the court
within one month, there is no timeframe in which the court
would be required to render a decision. In order to instill
confidence in electoral results and avoid ongoing political
battles, Blanc said that the Constitutional Court should be
required to resolve disputed elections within a fixed period
of time.


24. (C) As for women's representation, the draft law has a
provision requiring that 20 percent of the parliamentary
candidates on each electoral list be women. There is no
guaranteed minimum of actual seats in Parliament to be
awarded to female candidates, however. Erben dismissed this
provision as "a joke," and doubted that any female candidate
would win a seat in Parliament as a result of it. He and his
colleagues believed that only a law reserving a specific
number of parliamentary seats for women over the next few
elections would guarantee a minimum of female representation
in Parliament. They admitted that squaring a female quota
with existing confessional and districting constraints would
be "really tricky."

COMMENT
--------------


25. (C) Though IFES has not seen the entire actual text of
the draft law, their conversations with commission members
and NGO partners have given them a fairly detailed picture of
some of the law's major provisions. More importantly, they
have the technical expertise to discuss the impact of the
draft law's provisions at a level of detail which, to this
point, has largely been unavailable for electoral commission
members and involved civil society organizations.


26. (C) Comment, continued: Some of the provisions
discussed in this meeting, especially the 10 percent
threshold and the independent electoral commission, are of
critical importance to any future electoral law. We believe
that, even without having seen the final draft law, it is
probably the right time to start developing a USG position on
these issues. Further consultation with our civil society
partners and electoral commission members can help in this
regard. End comment.
FELTMAN