Tunisia, as we all know, has just come out from under a long dictatorship which followed another dictatorship.

A few weeks ago, the country was called to vote in the first free elections held for many, many years.

There was something in the Tunisian elections that maybe has not been noted here in Malta. That is the fact that the Tunisians used the postal vote.

We, on the contrary, are still living in Flintstone times. Every time an election comes round, even the election for the European Parliament, the political parties force Air Malta to lay on the so-called Lm10 flights – that is offering potential voters a cheap ticket to come to Malta and vote.

Not just them, but also their kith and kin who thus get a cheap holiday on the backs of our credulity that an election should be waged by as many people as possible, even the half-dead, and the people who by living abroad could not give a toss who wins an election here. After all, they will still go on living out there.

There is no guarantee that a person who benefits from this cheap ticket actually gets down to vote. On the contrary, there have been cases where people who came here on the cheap flights ended up not voting, either because they did not bother to or in some cases because the plane arrived too late for them to collect their votes.

One can possibly defend this ‘tradition’ as not being all that onerous on Air Malta for it practically means the airline laying on two or three charter flights but as anyone can see, that is not really the case. On the contrary, such extra flights put the entire schedule of the airline under undue pressure.

There is no other country in the world that does this. As there is no other country in the world where the search for the very last vote goes into such paroxystic lengths as here.

Other countries do it much simpler and without this frenzy. They have a system where people register as voters in the embassy of their country and vote at the embassy usually a few days before the actual voting day so that the votes can be sent to the home country. Others do it even more simply and just count the votes at the embassy itself and only transmit the results.

We, of course, still count the votes manually, one by one, in full sight of everyone. Well, that cannot necessarily be a bad thing – see what happened in the US in the Bush-Gore election when so many mechanically-counted votes turned out to be wrongly assigned.

But deep down there is something in our very Maltese way of doing elections that goes beyond the mere necessary prudence and which verges more on the deeply suspicious. Maybe this is one of them – we simply do not trust voting taking place in our country’s embassies because we simply do not trust the ambassadors and their staff.

Up till some years ago, when we had things such as embarkation cards etc. only people who actually resided in Malta for the better part of the year were allowed to vote. This Lm10 flight business has widened the electorate – people who do not reside here, who are never here during the year, who live, work, study etc. abroad are being registered as voters when previously such people would not have been considered as voters. This issue – who is a voter and who is not – has been settled without a real discussion about it.

Other countries do allow citizens who live abroad to vote in the home country’s elections. There is what one may call a citizen’s rights, a link between the mother country and its citizens living in far-flung countries which, in a way, gives them the right to get involved in matters regarding the country including who gets to govern.

But the point is, this right does not really need to push the national airline towards bankruptcy in order to be exercised. Even the Tunisians showed they could get this point.