Doreen Khoury, coordinator of the Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform, sat down with NOW Lebanon’s Deborah Brown to discuss the electoral law the parliament passed on September 27. The new electoral law is absent of many of the more controversial reforms proposed by the independent Boutros Commission’s draft, such as the formation of an Independent Election Commission and lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Khoury discusses CCER’s strategy for future reforms and what the campaign has in store for election day in 2009. 

NOW Lebanon: Now that the election law has been adopted absent of many of CCER’s proposed reforms, how will the CCER modify the campaign, and what is its strategy for moving forward?

Doreen Khoury:  The campaign’s strategy will be to move forward on two fronts. First, we will focus on educating both citizens and political parties on how they will be affected by the adopted reforms, and second, we will continue to push the reforms that weren’t passed, particularly, the Independent Election Commission, pre-printed ballots, the 30% quota for women, and lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. CCER will continue to campaign for these reforms regardless of the fact that they weren’t included in the law. Some reforms will have to wait, but some we are still going to try to pass before the 2009 elections.

NOW: Which reforms will CCER push for in 2009?

Khoury: The first is introducing pre-printed ballots. That this reform wasn’t passed reflects an unwillingness to standardize the voting procedures. And what is really shameful is that we [Lebanon] in the Arab world are the only country apart from Syria that doesn’t use the pre-printed ballot. And we are one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t use the pre-printed ballot. I don’t want to call it a scandal, but this is a big disappointment, and alarm bells should be going off.

NOW: Is this a feasible goal for the 2009 elections?

Khoury: Sure. We proved to them that, first of all, it’s not expensive. You need 25-30 days, so there’s still time to print them before the 2009 elections. When CCER was working with the Justice and Administration Committee, we closed the technical side. We showed them that technically it can be done. We proved to them it’s easy, [so they] don’t have to worry about that.

The reason that it was rejected was for political reasons. And I think [that] happened because the parliamentary sessions on the electoral law were not televised. Many of the citizens missed the debate, which would have really surprised and shocked many of them. Many of the MPs were supporting this reform and other reforms, and then they voted against it. CCER had a representative in the session. But the fact that it wasn’t filmed, it wasn’t live, meant that many people missed a lot of the really contradictory and unconvincing statements that were being made by MPs against some of the reforms.

NOW: Are there any other reforms are you looking to pass before this election?

Khoury: Yes, the Independent Election Commission. The IEC as it was in the original draft law failed. What replaced it is this condensed committee in the Ministry of the Interior which monitors campaign finance and the media. The problem with this committee is that it’s not independent. At the end of the day it’s still in the Ministry of the Interior. Now, we have [Interior Minister] Ziad Baroud, and Ziad Baroud has an excellent reputation.  We know that he’s not going to interfere with the workings of this committee, but we can’t guarantee that he’s going to be interior minister in 2013. We might get a minister who’s not interested in preserving its independence.

NOW: What are the other drawbacks of the modified committee?

Khoury:  In terms of campaign finance, it’s not clear how much penalizing power it has. How much it can penalize violators. In fact, it looks like it will just be a committee that takes in reports on campaign finance and it doesn’t even have the power to use them in the Constitutional [Council]. What it can do is release its report after the elections, and the losing candidate in a district can use it against another candidate. Then it has to go to the Constitutional [Council], but its term has expired. And also, constitutional lawyers are expensive.

NOW: What power does the committee have?

Khoury: The committee’s good on the media. It does have some authority to penalize media outlets that do violate the electoral law [by airing publicity spots for candidates for a certain period before the elections]. But what we are going to be doing, especially in terms of civil society, is that we’re going to be monitoring campaign finance. There is an awareness among us that this committee won’t have enough people on the ground to really effectively monitor campaign finance spending. Monitoring will take up a huge portion of our monitoring effort for 2009 and will be spearheaded by the Lebanese Transparency Association (LTA) but supported by the NGOs within the coalition. We hope to fill in the gaps and try to make citizens aware. We will try to show that “this is what we’re doing, these are the results, this is what is happening in your region.”  We hope to be able to coordinate with this committee.

NOW: With Ziad Baroud appointed the interior minister, people had high hopes for electoral reform. Why do you think that more of the reforms weren’t passed?

Khoury: It had nothing to do with Ziad Baroud. Ziad Baroud fought aggressively for the reforms; he fought aggressively for the Independent Election Commission [and] the pre-printed ballot. He defended it in parliament. He said on many occasions that “even though I’m minister of the interior, I still strongly support the Independent Electoral Commission.”  But at the end of the day he’s a minister. He’s not an MP or part of a big parliamentary bloc who’s voting in parliament.

The reforms failed because there was in many cases cross-factional agreements to get rid of the reforms... This is what our representatives sitting in parliament actually saw. At the end of the day, Ziad’s presence in the cabinet and in the Justice and Administration Committee pushed reforms that would never have passed. I’m sure of that. At the end of the day, there’s only so much he can do. But neither he nor us can counter political blocs who are agreeing with each other to kill certain reforms.

NOW: Do you feel that the criticism that Ziad Baroud has faced recently is undeserved?

Khoury: I think that the criticism is undue. The test for Ziad Baroud is from now to the 2009 elections. How he runs the election, how smoothly the election goes, and how far he can really deliver a good election. There may be some backlash from civil society organizations, but as I said, he’s a minister, not part of a political bloc, and he can’t influence the way they operate and the decisions they make. He can fight, and really put his weight behind certain things, but there are certain things that were certainly out of his control. Knowing the minister, I don’t think that he’s going to stop fighting.  

NOW: One of the most controversial reforms that was postponed until 2013 was out-of-country voting. Can you explain who exactly will be eligible to vote?

Khoury:  It’s very simple actually. It’s every citizen who is over the age of 21 is on the voter list and can vote. It’s not a question of giving them the right to vote. It’s ensuring the mechanism for them to vote abroad in embassies and consulates. I think what happened when the Justice and Administration Committee started to debate this, the minister of the interior said, “We’re ready, but we need a response from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it’s ready for the 2009 elections.” And the response came that “We are not ready for 2009. Our embassies and consulates are not ready;” Lebanon has 70 in the world.

NOW: Do you agree with this assessment?

Khoury: No. There’s this mentality that we can’t have elections abroad unless every single Lebanese person living abroad votes. This is a way to kill a reform. I think we would have been able to do the elections in the 70 consulates or embassies this time around. And then we would have worked from 2009 until 2013 to ensure that all Lebanese citizens are able to vote.

The technical reason for this is a camouflage for more political reasons. The political groups don’t know how these guys living abroad are going to vote. They can’t control them. They don’t want any surprises for 2009. They can’t influence them, it’s expensive to influence them, and they don’t have enough time.

Many of these reforms, like lowering the voting age, the pre-printed ballots and out-of-country voting failed because the MPs were nervous for the 2009 elections. All of them are portraying it as this historic event, and they don’t want any surprises.

NOW: Another highly-debated proposed reform was lowering the voting age. Do you see any possibility of this passing before the 2009 elections?

Khoury:  There is room for maneuver because the article says in the law that the voting age is according to the constitution, which leaves us open to lobby for an amendment to the constitution to reduce the voting age to 18 years.

NOW: And what is required to amend the constitution?

Khoury: An MP or a group of MPs must submit an amendment to the constitution, which is sent to parliament. The cabinet can do it, or the president. Process-wise it’s not difficult, but we need to convince a group of MPs to go out and do it. There needs to be the political will to do it. And it’s also going to require a huge effort on the part of civil society, especially youth groups, to push for this reform. It suffered the same fate as out-of-country voting; we don’t know how these guys are going to vote. Parties don’t have enough time to lobby them to vote for them.

NOW: What does the CCER have planned for election-day?

Khoury:  Our partner NGO, the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE), which usually leads the monitoring efforts, is going to be monitoring the elections. It’s going to be the biggest election monitoring effort in Lebanon’s history. LADE and LTA are starting now to prepare themselves, because it’s not going to be just elections monitoring on the day of the elections; we’re going to be monitoring the entire campaign period, which is two months prior to the election day. And it’s media monitoring, it’s finance monitoring, it’s monitoring the parties themselves, and it’s going to be very transparent.

NOW: What is your planned post-election activity?

Khoury: We plan to use the 2009 election monitoring results to push for further reform, starting with the IEC. I can almost guarantee it will be full of violations; it’s not going to be a smooth electoral process. We’re still going to face a lot of the old problems, and we’re still going to be seeing a lot of old, bad habits from before. The reform process is long. It doesn’t happen in one go. If you look at, for example, the reform process in the Mexico elections, it took them a decade. Our target is no longer 2009, but it doesn’t mean we won’t use 2009 to prove how bad the situation really is.

If this debate had happened two years ago on the election law, more of the reforms would have passed. And what we were saying since 2005 is “start working on the election law now.”  The closer we get to elections, the more nervous MPs get, and they start thinking about the result, and they start sacrificing reform.