The veda electoral curfew now in force inhibits forecasting the outcome of tomorrow’s midterms but this is a less irksome restriction than might meet the eye because in any case it would be pointless. The last nationwide vote in Argentina – the run-off on November 19, 2023 – was strictly an either/or proposition between two men with five-letter surnames beginning with “M” but tomorrow’s choice is anything but binary (although some would try to make it so). Voters are being asked to select not the next president but 127 deputies and 24 senators for which 217 lists are contending in the 23 provinces and this City with a total 1,648 candidates. The multiplicity of combinations arising from these numbers points to an infinity of results, each one of which would make the parliamentary negotiations lying ahead slightly different with no chance of any overall majority – 151 shades of grey.
The pollsters whose findings are banned under the veda are not exactly anticipating an open contest by and large but after the experience of last month’s Buenos Aires Province midterms (when nobody was even within five percentage points of the winning margin and almost everybody tipped barely a third), it should be considered open nonetheless – anything can happen. At the risk of flouting the veda, this columnist will challenge two of the firmest tenets of pundits – that President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza will poll 30-something percent tomorrow (with huge differences as to what that “something” might be) and that a slam dunk awaits Peronism in Buenos Aires Province after last month’s aforementioned landslide.
The notion that Milei has a floor of 30 percent is based on the persistence of that figure in both the PASO primaries and the first round in 2023 while repeated in this City’s midterms last May. Yet analysis of those 2023 voters has shown them to be anything but a hard core – over 80 percent of them were primarily discontented then and might well be discontented now, a volatile floating vote in these liquid times. As for the Kirchnerism of Buenos Aires Province, it has been suggested that the very dimensions of last month’s landslide might have been counterproductive in generating a fear factor but a bigger enemy could be complacency – no incentives for re-elected mayors to distribute ballots which are in any case unavailable with the new system of the Boleta Unica de Papel housed in voting-precincts. This is not to deny the probability of a government vote of 30-something and a strong Peronist performance in Buenos Aires Province tomorrow, simply their certainty – with various other factors which will not be considered today in order to avoid infringing the veda any further.
For that reason no more partisan comments in this column (hopefully the above at least even-handed in questioning the clout of both the main sides). So what to write? Perhaps the most neutral would be to offer some kind of television guide for following tomorrow’s results in 24 different races with their 217 lists and 1,648 candidates, especially inland since this capital and by far the biggest district (Buenos Aires Province) are a natural focus for attention.
Inland the provinces of Córdoba and Santa Fe are dominant – together with Buenos Aires City and Province, they are the only districts with 15 or more lists on their ballots (otherwise Chaco and Misiones are the only provinces with their number of lists in double digits). Apart from the big four, five other provinces have seven-digit electorates making bigger contributions to vote totals – Chaco, Entre Ríos, Mendoza, Salta and Tucumán.
Also with added value warranting a closer watch are the eight provinces electing their three senators as well as deputies. Half of these already appeared in the previous paragraph (Buenos Aires City, Chaco, Entre Ríos and Salta) – the other four are Santiago del Estero and the three Patagonian provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro and Tierra del Fuego.
At this point readers might be ready to welcome some names which can be safely ignored. All provinces electing two deputies – Chubut, Formosa, La Rioja, Río Negro and Tierra del Fuego (with also senatorial races in the latter two) – are incapable of producing any surprises because the electoral system excludes any outcome other than the two main contenders ending up with one deputy each. In order to demonstrate this, it is necessary to explain the D’Hondt system of successive division.
This is widely misunderstood, so much so that D’Hondt (named after the 19th century Belgian mathematician Victor d’Hondt from the University of Ghent) is usually misspelled. To give an example of successive division, if a party wins 24 percent of the vote, the first name on the list has a full quotient of 24 points, the second name 12 points (or half dividing by two), the third name eight (a third), the fourth six (a quarter), etc. The 35 deputies for Buenos Aires Province, for example, would thus be elected by calculating the 35 highest quotients among the 525 candidates in the 15 lists. The system for senators is much simpler – the list with the most votes elects two senators with the third going to the runner-up.
Applying the D’Hondt system to the provinces with two deputies, if one party wins 58 percent of the vote and the other main party 30 percent (a truly massive difference), it would still be one seat each because the winner’s second quotient of 29 percent is less than 30 percent. In provinces with four seats (Chaco, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán) such a margin would give the winner three seats since 58 divided by three is more than the other party’s second quotient of 15 percent but were last month’s Buenos Aires Province landslide (47.35 percent to 33.78 percent) to be replicated in a four-seat province, the outcome would be two seats each despite the huge margin. In general, small or even moderate leads will only make a difference in provinces with odd numbers of seats.
But enough of dodging the main issues in order to stay good with the veda – bring on tomorrow’s vote with full analysis in next Saturday’s column.
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