parliament voteThe less than 50% vote........well there are a few possible explanations for that. Plesae read on....
1. It would be interesting to find out if this was MPRP (sp?) driven, or driven by the opposition. I suspect the opposition, then the majority party which undoubtedly knew of it, decided not to vote on it (why get nailed voting "against the people" in the next election when there are other ways to kill it) and just were conveniently absent for the vote. Since the MPRP is the majority, that would explain the vote passing without the majority of the chamber voting.
2. Really, the many missing members could have been out to dinner, or an event, or whatever and didn't come back in time and surprise....it passed.
It could be a combo of both....
I intimately experienced this myself. For 12 years I was an elected State Representative in a southern state in the US. My party was in the minority, just 42% of the members. One day I offered at the last minute a surprise controversial amendment (unpopular with the ruling elites but very popular to the people at home across the state) to a mundane bill on the floor for a vote.
The Speaker, wishing to avoid the surprise and confusion on how to handle it ("how do we kill this so it never gets noticed so we can still show our faces back home and still get the original bill passed")gaveled down the House for lunch and told everyone to be back at 1:00pm sharp.
Well to make a long story short, my side showed up, the other side was still at lunch or yakking with Lobbyist, and we won the vote 53-38, just at the constitutional 91 votes (out of 180 members) needed to be a legal vote. So this controversial amendment was passed with only 53 votes out of 180, yet still legal.
However, in the long run the amendment was stripped from the original bill in a series of complicated procedural votes that sucessfully insulated the members from any backlash at home.
There are all sorts of games that can be played with Parliamentary processes.
bj2