It is a disgrace about these changes to the Electoral Commission. As I pointed out in my post of 14th December, the estimated cost of the Commission is £207,000, of which £60,000 is set aside for the fees of the two external members and another £20,000 for their travel and accommodation. Obviously there would be no point in having these two experts now because unless their advice happened to correspond with the aims of Sir Philip, the other three members (two of them presumably being carefully-appointed allies of Sir Philip) simply wouldn't follow it.
Possibly we would end up with two different options being put to the islanders in a referendum- the experts' minority recommendation versus the majority's. In my opinion, a Bailhache Commission would only allow a choice of recommendations if the Bailhache one looked good alongside the experts' one. For example, if Sir Philip was smart, he would engineer a situation whereby his recommendations were pitched against, for example, a Clothier-style recommendation to switch to an all-Deputy house. This would split the reformist vote because we've already had a decade to act on the Clothier reforms but clearly there is no decisive political mandate for that, so if that option was pitched against a conservative Bailhache proposal to keep the Constables and substitute some of the urban Deputies' seats with islandwide Senators (thereby wooing the anti-Pitmans/Southern vote), the latter conservative option might win.
Put simply, the Electoral Commission should now be scrapped. Another advantage for the anti-reformists (of whom I count Bailhache as one) of having a sham Commission going through the motions for the next few years is that it will prevent the newly-elected Assembly from having any opportunity of its own to debate States reform until after the referendum- and then they will be placed under huge pressure to approve whatever recommendation polled most amongst voters, even if that is clearly not the right solution.
