Electoral law, the Senate introduces three preferences but leaves list leaders blocked

A story the morning edition did not report, and one that shifts the most contested point of the electoral reform: the Senate has approved the majority’s amendment introducing preferences into the new law, while keeping list leaders blocked. Voters will be able to express up to three preferences, with gender alternation. The opposition’s proposal, which aimed instead to make all candidates freely selectable, did not pass. The floor vote closed with 97 yes, 67 no and 2 abstentions.

Before addressing the substance, a note on the limits of the material. The news currently comes from a single source (the account of the floor vote picked up by the national press review of Quotidiano dei Contribuenti); no independent confirmation is available. That is, we do not have the text of the approved amendment, nor the roll-call record of the vote: we have the result and a summary of its content. It is a narrow scope, and we state it here rather than leaving it to be inferred.

What was actually decided. The formula emerging from the floor combines two things that in recent days’ debate had been presented as alternatives. On one hand, preferences return: up to three, with the constraint of gender alternation, meaning the obligation not to concentrate them on candidates of the same sex. On the other hand, the first name on each list remains outside voters’ choice: they are elected by virtue of the position the party assigned them, not the personal votes they gather.

The result is a system in which the share of seats allocated by designation and the share allocated by voters’ choice coexist on the same ballot. How many seats fall into one category or the other does not depend on the rule in the abstract: it depends on how many candidates each list elects in each constituency. Where a list elects only one candidate, preferences have no effect on the name; where it elects several, they count from the second onward.

Preferences return, but they apply starting from the second name on the list.

This is precisely the point on which the gap with the opposition emerged, whose proposal — rejected — would have made all candidates selectable, list leaders included. The compromise within the majority responds to two simultaneous needs: addressing criticism of entirely closed lists while preserving for parties control over a share of elected members.

The timeline. The text now moves to the Chamber, where floor debate is scheduled from September 28. Until then, the reform remains a single-chamber text: everything the Senate has approved can be amended at Montecitorio, and any amendment would require a new passage. Today’s vote therefore does not close the question of preferences; it hands it to another branch of Parliament with a defined starting point.

What we do not know. We do not know the literal text of the approved amendment nor its placement within the articles, and we do not know which other issues in the reform — thresholds, majority bonuses, allocation methods — were addressed in the same session or remain open. We do not know how the 67 votes against were distributed among the groups, nor who the two abstaining senators are. Finally, we have no statements from the parties involved: the available source reports the result, not the reactions. When the approved text becomes available, we will return to the mechanism with the document before us, not with its summary.