Gerrymandering Electoral Districts - A Brief History of Redistricting in Lebanon, and its influential Role in the Electoral Process
Opinion Policy Analysis by Nicole Nicolas, Visiting Contributor
April 23rd, 2021
The overwhelming majority of the world’s countries have elections as an integral part of their political system.
After the end of the cold war, it is said that “Democracy prevailed”. Technically, people around the world now have the ability to choose who they want to elect to power. In turn, these elected individuals are given the right to rule and run their respective counties for a given period of time through a social contract. In the 21st century, most world leaders, with the exception of a handful, are brought to power through some form of an electoral process. It all seems rainbows and sunshine at first; power to the people - the people choose their own destiny and their leadership. Until, as the situation requires, we dig further and form an understanding of how elections actually work. Then its not all rainbows or sunshine for much longer.
The 'glamour' of the one-man one-vote electoral process does not always lay the groundwork for equal and fair representation. Let's walk through the logic behind it all. For elections to work, peoples’ votes need to be equally grouped together and counted - and it's not very feasible to have, for example, 2 million Lebanese voters all voting in one place. So naturally, voters need to be split into different regions for voter feasibility. For example, voters in Tripoli visit polling stations in Tripoli and voters in Zahle visit polling stations in Zahle - this is one way of splitting stations. Now, with the logistics done, the votes need to be counted and the results of winning candidates need to be announced - but how does that happen? How does someone win? How many people win? This is where things get tricky, and this is where we begin to unpack why it isn’t always ‘all rainbows and sunshine’.
Picture this -lets say, for example, that you have 10 people in Tripoli with 6 seats up for election and 5 people in Zahle with 6 seats up for election. All of the 10 people in Tripoli love to eat apples, and as such will only vote for candidates who eat apples. All of the 5 people in Zahle, on the other hand, love to eat bananas, and not apples. These 5 people will as such only vote for candidates who eat bananas. If each region is counted as its own district, it's likely that candidates who eat apples will win the seats allocated to Tripoli and candidates who eat bananas will win the seats allocated to Zahle. We’ll have 6 representatives for apple-lovers and 6 representatives for banana-lovers.
Now, say instead of having two separate districts, we decide to bring Tripoli and Zahle together and turn them into one single district, what happens then? The 10 apple loving voters in Tripoli will outnumber the 4 banana loving voters in Zahle, and the majority of winning candidates will be ones who eat apples, depending on the law, it could be 9 out of the 12 seats or all 12 seats. The voters in Zahle went from choosing their own representatives alone, to choosing less or no representatives when grouped with Tripoli.
Think of the “people who love bananas'' as a demographic. In reality, we have different - and more relevant - demographics such as race, sex, age, religion and ethinicity. So, if different demographics are grouped together in certain ways, some people’s votes will lose their value. It's no longer one-man one-vote, it becomes a battle over demographic representation. Whoever gets to choose the districts, wins. That's exactly what politicians and political parties have been doing for years and years: battling to engage in redistricting that benefits them. This process of redistricting to manipulate the vote is called gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups. Unfortunately, in the same world described above, where the overwhelming majority of countries around the world have elections, gerrymandering plays a big role in diluting the value of voting and entrenching power in the hands of a few.
Like most other nations of the modern world, Lebanon has played host to countless, and very elaborate, forms of gerrymandering. Lebanon’s electoral districts have been drawn and redrawn several times since the country’s inception. In a sectarian power sharing system dating back to 1943, Lebanon’s sectarian leaders have always agreed to draw district lines together, each side going for a bigger piece of the pie. With a few seasonal disputes here and there, an arrangement is always reached, “No winners and no losers”, according to the late Prime Minister Saeb Salam - a principle that defines Lebanon’s political structure to this very day. The result of such agreements means that election results are almost always determined before elections even take place.
The current districting system is based on eight large muhafazat (Lebanon's administrative regions), which are subdivided into 26 smaller qadas (districts). At first glance, one can assess redistricting as a form of empowerment and representation for minorities in Lebanon. However, in reality redrawing electoral districts has many underlying motives that go beyond identity politics. In Lebanon, it has also been a political move to minimize opponents’ representation in government or increase representation for one party over the other.
Historically, redistricting has been a common practice among national political parties. The Ministry of Interior, led by political leadership, has often gerrymandered districts based on the agenda of the partisan government in power. Redistricting is no novel phenomenon in Lebanon, and is a product of the longstanding confessional system in the country. The current administrative divisions as they stand have not always been divided as such. Electoral changes have been a constant in Lebanon. That partly being due to the lack of consensus on an electoral system that divides power evenly among political parties and maintains representation. The consistent gerrymandering of electoral districts is not only a reflection of these tensions, but also of the absence of a strong electoral system. It is no coincidence that major electoral changes in the last few decades coincide with political and civil tensions within the country.
In 1951, a new electoral law introduced nine medium-sized multi-member constituencies with 4-14 members representing each district based on size and population. 1953, witness another drastic shift in this design. The number of electoral districts jumped to 33, with 1-2 members representing each district in a 44-seat parliament. Between 1960 to 1972, Lebanon underwent 4 elections under the same system: 26 electoral districts with 1-8 representatives per district, and a 99-seat parliament. It was not until 1992 that the electoral system was revisited and redrawn. Of course, the pie was sliced by and for the warlords in the name of maintaining peace after a prolonged period of civil conflict.
In the advent of the civil war, and the first parliamentary elections after the Taif Agreement, the voting model changed yet again.
With the support of the Syrian government engineered multi-member constituencies and redivided them into varying sizes. The number of electoral districts plummeted back down to 12 - two of which were single governorates (Beirut and North Lebanon). There were large gaps between district representation (3-28), and the size of the parliament expanded to 128. Rather than instituting a system where candidates directly represent their electoral constituencies before representing the muhafaza, the government chose the opposite. Politically, this meant that elected candidates did not need to win a majority vote in multiple districts to win a governorate. Rather, elected candidates really only needed to win the majority of votes overall - even if they received fewer votes at the district level - to be elected. From a political standpoint, this strategy is quite effective for politicians. The political class banks on greater support if it focuses on majority votes in a muhafaza rather than honing in on gaining support from every district.
The quintessential example of gerrymandering in Lebanon is post-civil war Beirut divided into two districts based on the old front lines of the civil war between Christian and Muslim militias. According to the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) in 2008, muhafazat Beirut as one qada is one example of why election districting is particularly controversial. There have been many attempts to redistrict Beirut’s neighborhoods into districts that serve political interests. For example, at the time LADE highlighted that the “Beirut constituencies tended to dilute Christian votes, while the Boutrous Commission draft law tends to concentrate the Christian seats and voters in one specific election district.” This view was not shared by many. On the other side of the aisle, potential redistricting of Beirut was seen as a tactic to hurt Sunni representation.
The 1996, 2000, and 2005 elections also experienced changes - whether that be merging or further dividing districts - which were influenced by external players as well. By 2009, after the Doha agreement, the government settled on 26 electoral districts, 128 seats in parliament, and 2-10 representatives per district depending on its size. This electoral law was largely based on the 1960 law which established each qada as an electoral district, with some exceptions.
This electoral system did not last long.
In 2017, to complicate matters even more, a long-awaited (after 3 postponements) new law was passed redesigned the electoral districts from 26 smaller districts to 15 larger electoral districts. Historically, smaller districts were considered more homogenous in their sectarian identity. The proposal to shift to larger electoral districts has often been met with criticism from minorities because they feared demographic majorities in larger districts could elect minority seats, which was seen as suppressing minority votes. With that said, such contentions over a district’s confessional demography in certain constituencies is a reflection of these sectarian tensions. However, there is a stark disconnect between political motives for redistricting and perceived motives for redistricting. For example, this reworked voting scheme, whether through redistricting or seat redistribution, merely serves to redraw the representation of power among the political class and has less to do with sectarian grievances among the population.
One major example that leaves you more perplexed by changes in the electoral system is the Said-Jezzine electoral district. Anyone looking at the geographic location of these two districts is left puzzled by their merger to make up one electoral district called “South 1”. Yet it comes as no surprise that these two districts, representing Sunni and Christian minorities in the Shia dominant South, are sliced up by sectarian elite politicians to form an electoral district in order to maintain seats in parliament. Beyond classic slicing the pie tactics, major Christian parties were capitalizing on sectarian grievances to mobilize support and ensure major seats were won by major Christian parties instead of muslim parties. These tactics are not unique to one sect in Lebanon.
In fact, if there is anything equal beyond the 64:64 Christian-Muslim ratio in parliament, its the equal capitalization of sectarian insecurities by political parties to redraw electoral district or redistribute seats in government for the sole purpose of sustaining the oligarchy.
There are very few common practices beyond corruption that our government exercises. A couple of those consistent trends are redistricting qadas or redistributing seats in parliament. Another few worth mentioning are maintaining the major discrepancies between electoral districts and their allocated seats, and voting thresholds for elected representatives. For example, the number of electoral tallies drastically varies depending on the district. In Beirut’s First District, a majority Christian district, only 7,000 votes are needed to make the slate. A stark difference from districts in the south and the north where more than 25,000 tallies are needed. Of course, electoral tallies will also vary depending on the density of the population. However, thes huge gaps between district sizes, seat allocation, and electoral tallies, coupled with a weak proportional representation (PR) system has proven to be ineffective in nature.
Our current system as it stands, as Sami Atallah and Zeina El-Helou eloquently described it in 2017, “contains elements of proportional representation (PR), [but] its soul is majoritarian and its districts are crafted according to a political and sectarian calculus.” If the upcoming 2022 elections take place, we can confidently anticipate another round of redistricting to take place.
Will the Lebanese people be voting based on the 2017 electoral law? Or will we go back to the 1960 law? Time will tell, yet what we can be sure of is that if the oligarchy is confident enough in the electoral outcome of the next election, then they may choose to cook up another gerrymandering recipe and sprinkle sectarian rhetoric to gain support from their base while hurting alternative parties in the process.
Still, just like our electoral process, there is no banking on any consistency from existing political parties. Nonetheless, we can bank on ourselves to work through the system and elect our own representatives regardless of the system they choose to engineer.