Political point of view: 300 deputies | Jorge Alcocer V.

Jorge Alcocer V.

Morena and her allies must not have more than 300 deputies in the next legislative body of the Chamber of Deputies, which begins on September 1 of this year.

I am not saying that. This is stated in Article 54, Section IV of the Constitution, which states that “no political party may have more than 300 deputies on both principles.”

The debate is whether this limit should apply to both parties and the coalitions they form. Since June 3 and several times since, the head of the Interior Ministry, not the INE, has said that Morena and her allies should have 373 deputies together, since Article 54 of the Constitution refers to parties, not coalitions. Small detail: he never reads the entire article.

Let us see what section I of the above mentioned article literally states:

“HEY. In order to register its regional lists, a political party must prove that it participates together with candidates for deputy by a relative majority in at least two hundred single-mandate constituencies.”

If it is argued that Article 54 is to be interpreted literally, then such a reading should be applied to the entire article.

The consequence of this would be that Morena, PVEM and PT would not comply with the provisions of Section I. They would not have had their 5 regional lists of multi-member candidates registered and would not have the right to be appointed as deputies on this basis. Morena and her allies would retain the 256 deputies they had won by a majority of votes. The only way to save this mess would be to maintain the interpretation that the requirement of Section I of Article 54 can be met by both individual parties and coalitions. To ensure uniformity of interpretation, the same interpretation should be given in the other sections of the same article. They apply to both parties and coalitions.

In short, it is not permissible to postulate that in Section I the requirement of “party” can be fulfilled by a coalition, while Sections IV and V of the same Article 54 do not apply to coalitions. This is an interpretation of the same word or phrase at will.

There is another article in the Constitution itself that illustrates well how to properly apply the rule that, when it concerns a party, must also apply to electoral coalitions. Article 56 establishes that the first senatorial minority will correspond to “the political party which by itself has obtained the second largest number of votes in each state.” From

In 2000, IFE/INE interpreted that for these purposes, coalitions are considered as a single party.

The restrictions of Article 54 of the Constitution applicable to parties and coalitions have a sequence that must be respected in the procedure for appointing multi-member deputies.

The first thing that INE must take into account is that Morena has won the majority of votes in 256 constituencies, but of these victories, she is giving, by agreement, 38 to the PT and 57 to the Greens. But on her own or in a coalition, Morena has a majority in 256 constituencies, which is the base number for continuing the distribution of multi-member candidates.

In accordance with the Constitution and the law, in order to distribute 200 multi-member deputies, the NIN must follow the following procedure:

1. a) Obtain the national vote total (VNE), which is the result of subtracting from the national total number of votes for federal deputies cast in the elections of 2 June the zero votes, the votes for unregistered candidates, the votes for parties that have lost their registration (PRD) and the independent candidates.
2. The VNE is divided by 200 (which corresponds to the number of multi-member seats), the result is called the “natural coefficient”.
3. The votes received by each party or coalition are divided by the natural coefficient, and the result in whole numbers gives the number of multi-member seats that each party (or coalition) has as a whole. If there are still seats to be distributed, the largest remainder rule will apply.
4. Having done the above, the INE must ensure that the sum of the number of constituencies won by a party or coalition plus its corresponding multi-party constituencies does not exceed 300. If this is the case, the INE must subtract from that party or coalition the necessary number of multi-member members so that the total number of its deputies – majoritarian and multi-member – does not exceed this limit.
5. Finally, the INE will have to ensure that no party or coalition exceeds the limit of over-representation permitted by Section V of Article 54 of the Constitution, which is 8 percentage points.

For a systematic, functional and harmonious interpretation of the constitutional norms in force since 1996, for the meaning and reason for the restrictions on overrepresentation, for the preservation of pluralism, but above all for respect for the right to vote, popular sovereignty, Morena, the PVEM and the PT should not have more than 300 deputies.

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