[Ip-health] Will WHO election favor the weak? Tactical voting in the Executive Board could mean top candidates don't make the shortlist

[James Love]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/daily/24804/

Will WHO election favor the weak?
Tactical voting in the Executive Board could mean top candidates
don't make the shortlist

[Published 18th September 2006 04:16 PM GMT]


With eight weeks to go until the World Health Organization appoints
its new director general, there are 13 candidates vying for the most
prominent position in global health. But some observers worry that
the election process to select the successor to Lee Jong-Wook could
favor the weaker candidates.

The issue lies with the way the election is run within the WHO
Executive Board. The board's 34 members, each representing a WHO
member country, must first cut the long list of 13 names down to
five, and then select a candidate to put forward to the World Health
Assembly on November 9.

To generate the shortlist, each board member puts forward a list of
his or her favorite candidates, and the five with the most votes get
through. For the past two elections, board members have been asked to
choose exactly five names, although that number could change, WHO
spokeswoman Christine McNab told The Scientist.

Only once the shortlist is made are the candidates officially given a
chance to lay out their policy manifestoes with speeches and so on.

Derek Yach, director of the Rockefeller Foundation's program on
global health and a former executive director at WHO, is concerned
that the best candidates may not make it through the cut from 13 to
five. "The trouble is, how do you get from 13 down to five and ensure
that the strongest candidates get past that point?" he said in an
interview with The Scientist.

There is a risk that tactical voting within the board could twist the
process, Yach said. Representatives who support a particular
candidate might be tempted to create a list that includes their
favorite candidate and four other candidates they think are too weak
to represent a challenge.

Modeling the probabilities of who will be chosen in that kind of
process suggests that "the weakest of the weakest" could make it
through. "There are some good candidates out there," Yach said. "The
question is whether those people are going to make it to the shortlist."

This kind of tactical voting hasn't been a feature of recent
elections, but this year's candidate pool of 13 is particularly large
and contains an unusual number of candidates from significant
countries. That could raise the chances that tactical voting will
have an impact, said Christopher Murray, director of the Harvard
Initiative for Global Health and another former executive director at
the World Health Organization.

"One could say that when you go from 13 to five, the potential for
even a few tactical voters to sway the outcome is higher," he told
The Scientist. "A small number of tactical votes could lead to some
unusual results. That's the part everyone worries about."

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has been critical of the WHO
election process for some time. On the journal's podcast this week,
he points out that "electing the pope is more transparent than
electing the director-general of the WHO."

In the podcast, he mentions the concern that the weakest candidates
could end up getting the most votes. "This would be utterly mad," he
says. "But this is how we're electing our WHO leader."

Stephen Pincock
spincock@the-scientist.com


Links within this article

S. Pincock, "Hunt for new WHO head heats up," The Scientist, July 25,
2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24063/

S. Pincock, "Who's up for top WHO job?" The Scientist, September 7,
2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/browse/blogger/10/

S. Pincock, "WHO ponders future without Lee," The Scientist, June 2,
2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23487/

WHO Executive Board
http://www.who.int/governance/eb/en/

Derek Yach
http://www.rockfound.org/AboutUs/FoundationAnnouncement/117

Christopher Murray
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/facres/mrry.html

The Lancet
http://www.thelancet.com/

---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

"If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks."  Bill Walton