By Martin Hellicar
THE HOUSE plenum unanimously approved an eleventh-hour amendment to electoral law yesterday after deputies struck a back-room deal to drop a second amendment.
The approved amendment means votes for the February 8 presidential elections will now be counted, not a polling stations, but at district counting centres.
The second amendment tabled by opposition party Akel – that a cast ballot be valid even if a voter had placed his cross on the candidate’s photograph rather than in the designated blank space below – was dropped following a break in afternoon proceedings to allow parties to iron out a deal.
With the “put-your-cross-where-you-like” amendment shelved, governing Disy dropped their objections to the other amendment, and it was passed unanimously at 6pm at the end of a long day’s debating.
Passing the amendment was the last act of the last session of the plenum before the elections.
During debate of the amendments earlier, Disy leader Nicos Anastassiades dismissed Akel’s claims the amendments were necessary to ensure next months’ elections could not be “tampered” with.
Anastassiades said Cyprus had “grown out of” the problem of parties trying to “intimidate” voters, as might have happened in the past.
He also said it was “not right” for Akel to be trying to change the electoral law so close to an election, especially when the legislation in its current form had been unanimously approved by the plenum only one month ago. Anastassiades also warned that amending the law could lead to the February elections being postponed or even declared invalid, forcing a second election.
If the House approved the amendments and President Clerides decided to send them back to the House for re-consideration, there would not be enough time for this before the elections, forcing a postponement, the Disy leader said. If someone challenged the amendments on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court would have to rule on them, forcing postponement of polling day, or a second vote (if the challenge came after the elections), Anastassiades said.
Akel’s Andreas Christou took the stand to reply to Anastassiades. He said the amendments did not represent a change to electoral law, but only tinkering with its provisions, and could thus not be challenged on constitutional grounds.
He repeated the Akel position that it would be impossible to check that vote counting and ballot validation procedures were not being interfered with if votes were counted at local polling stations.
“Big parties, and I speak as a representative of one myself, can man all local polling stations to keep an eye on things, but small parties cannot,” he said.
As a number of deputies stood up to say their bit, Diko parliamentary spokesman Tassos Papadopoulos suggested a short recess to allow deputies to discuss the issue and reach a compromise behind closed doors. House president Spyros Kyprianou adopted Papadopoulos’ suggestion and returned half an hour later to announce a deal had been struck.
