Following on this previous post, here is Zachary Smith on the recent UAE election. Zachary is the opinion editor of The Daily Nebraskan and was a 2010 Boren Scholar in Jordan.
On Saturday, September 24, the United Arab Emirates held its “second-ever parliamentary election”:http://tmc.org/blog/2011/09/21/election-report-united-arab-emirates/. Given the small size of the electorate in the 2006 election (just under 6,000 citizens were given the right to vote), it was hard to predict the results of this election, in which voters selected half—20—of the Federal National Council.
First of all, turnout was very low: of the around 129,000 eligible voters, only just over 36,000 people, or 28 percent, “cast ballots”:http://en.news.maktoob.com/20090001086964/UAE_s_second_election_has_low_turnout/Article.htm. The minister in charge of the election, Dr. Anwar Mohammad Gargash, expressed his disappointment at the low turnout, saying he “hoped for a broader one [participation]”. In particular, Gargash pointed to the problems with the widely-touted electronic voting system that occurred at Al-Ain polling station, delaying results in the heavily populated emirate of Abu Dhabi.
Preliminary results—the National Election Committee will examine any reported irregularities on September 28—show a potential flaw in the UAE’s electoral system. As noted in the pre-election report, 469 candidates participated in the election. Yet instead of utilizing an instant-runoff system, or a party list system, the UAE chose to run a first-past-the-post plurality-wins election. With so many candidates, the numbers for winners are striking.
In the sparsely populated emirate of Fujairah, for instance, the winning two candidates had 436 and 396 votes out of the 2,167 cast. Twenty candidates, including three women, ran in this emirate; yet the winner received only 20 percent of the vote.
The UAE’s electorate, from the rural emirate of Umm al Qaiwain, did choose one woman, Shaikha Isa Ghanem al-Ari, who nevertheless only won just under 30 percent of the vote. It seems that, given the first-past-the-post system, voting power of women was diluted, even though they made up around 46 percent of the electorate. In many ways, this is surprising: official after official stressed the importance of women in the political system, including the former Speaker of the FNC. The neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced the right of women’s suffrage and ability to serve on the shura council on Sunday.
Officials now pledge to increase the powers delegated to the FNC, though it is unclear whether it will have legislative authority. The Supreme Council will appoint the other half of the FNC in the near future, though the date remains unclear.