Fergus Finlay: Is the 'spoil your vote' campaign loony or something more sinister?

A group campaign outside Leinster House for people to spoil their vote in the upcoming presidential election. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos

Imagine this for just a second. It’s polling day. You have your polling card in your pocket, and you’ve brought some identification, just in case. But when you get to the polling station, there’s a big burly guy blocking your way in. There’s a bulge under his jacket that looks suspiciously like a gun in a holster.

“You don’t need to come in here,” he says. “It’s ok. You can go home, have a cup of tea. We’ll make the decision for you and fill in your ballot paper. You’re not needed.” 

I’m just wondering. How would you feel if that happened. Do you think you’d just go home, glad to have the responsibility of casting a vote lifted from your shoulders? Or do you think maybe, just maybe, you’d consider taking to the streets in protest against the fascist takeover of your vote?

And yet I keep meeting people who seem to be hell-bent on spoiling their votes in the presidential election this weekend. Are you kidding me? Deliberately spoiling your vote is exactly the same as saying to the rest of the world, you make the decision for me, I couldn’t be bothered. It’s giving away your vote.

Some of us — most of us, I reckon — would be prepared to stand and fight rather than allow our right to vote be taken away. Yet according to the polls, maybe as many as one in 12 of us are going to spoil that hugely precious commodity. We’re going to abandon our authority, our power, our right to choose the next president of Ireland.

That’s nutty. Still, I guess each of us has the democratic right to do whatever we wish in the privacy of the ballot box. What’s much worse is that there’s now a group of people out there determined to persuade us to give up our vote. There’s a campaign, a website, an utterly misleading slogan — “make your vote roar” it pretends to say, when what it means is make sure your vote counts for nothing.

Maria Steen was not unfairly blocked. She started late, ignored the local authorities, and got 18 Oireachtas members to support her. If she was serious, she’d have started three months earlier and really put her back into it.  Picture: Sam Boal/Collins

I don’t know whether these are loonies or something more sinister. But I can think of nothing less democratic than spending resources on trying to persuade people to waste their vote. They’re doing it, according to themselves, because: “A conservative, nationalist voice has been blocked, leaving voters with Government and left-only options”.

One of their leaders has made a video from what seems like a very posh library in a very posh house, expressing his delight at the emergence of a spoil the vote campaign. He has announced he intends to write 1 Maria Steen on his ballot paper, knowing that will ensure his vote won’t count. Because, according to him, Maria Steen was unfairly blocked.

No, she wasn’t. She started late, ignored the local authorities, and got 18 Oireachtas members to support her. If she was serious, she’d have started three months earlier and really put her back into it. 

And the reason she started so late? According to herself in the Sunday Independent, she was (a) waiting to see if Michael McDowell would run and (b) concerned about the impact a campaign might have on her family. It is absolute bilge to pretend she was blocked.

Everyone who wants to take part in any presidential election knows full well there are two requirements, and neither of them is easy. This time around, as everyone knew from the start, three political parties, if they chose to, could put a candidate into the field. Everyone else had to build a coalition of support, either in the Oireachtas or among local authorities.

The last time round, four independents succeeded in getting local authority nominations. Michael D Higgins as outgoing president nominated himself, as he was entitled to do. Sinn Féin Oireachtas members nominated a candidate. So there were six in all.

In 2011, Labour nominated Michael D. Fine Gael and Sinn Féin Oireachtas members nominated candidates, and four independents came from local authority votes. So on that occasion too, six candidates.

So all this stuff about the political parties blocking access is nonsense. In fact, what we’re left with is a weird mix of sour grapes and a strange anti-democratic vibe that’s masquerading as a demand for more democracy.

It’s not a secret that I wanted to be on this ballot paper. And it’s not a secret that I wasn’t wanted. If I was going around the place telling people to spoil their vote because I wasn’t the chosen one, you’d be more than entitled to conclude that I’m a spoiled baby.

We don’t just have the right to vote in Ireland. We have a sophisticated voting system that allows us to express all of our choices in different ways, and ensures those choices are fairly reflected in the results. It may be the best and most accurate system in the world. 

Sure, democracy can make for strange bedfellows when all the votes are counted, but that’s a political management issue, not the consequence of a lack of democracy.

Compare that to the situation on the other side of the Irish Sea and their wildly undemocratic “first past the post” system. In the last general election a year ago, UK Labour won 34% of the votes and 64% of the seats. The Tories won 24% of votes and 18% of seats. 

Don’t go down the slippery slope of spoiling your vote or in any way abandoning your right to vote. File picture: Rui Vieira/PA Wire

The imbalance was such that Labour ended up winning a seat for every 24,000 votes they secured, while the Tories had to get nearly 57,000 votes for every seat they managed to hold onto.

Nobody, of course, is shedding any tears for the Tories, but on all sides of politics in the UK serious people privately admit the system has gone mad. Whatever about the last election, opinion polling now suggests “first past the post” could well mean the Reform Party could go from four seats to over 300 in any early election, while the Tories could disappear from the face of the earth. That may not be a result that anyone really wants, but it’s what their mad system is geared to deliver.

Our system is much better at delivering what people really want. And there are two ways you can do it — by organising your choices from 1 down, or (and I’ve often done this myself) by using a process of elimination. I often find myself being very clear about who I want on top and who I want least, and I organise my ballot paper that way.

It’s easier, of course, when the ballot paper is a short one. I’ll be voting for everyone on the paper on Friday, starting with a third preference this time, then a second, then a first. And I will happily accept the outcome and wish the winner well, knowing they have a solemn oath to take on our behalf.

Please, please, please. Don’t opt out. Don’t go down the slippery slope of spoiling your vote or in any way abandoning your right to vote. Don’t hand it over to anyone else. Take 10 or 15 minutes out of your life, because that’s all it takes, and choose the next president of your own country.