Paul Hosford: Is it too easy to get on the ballot paper in Ireland?
To be included in the European elections last week, you had to fulfil one of three criteria: be nominated by a registered political party, pay a deposit of €1,800 or obtain 60 signatures supporting your nomination from the public. Picture: Dan Linehan
If you've never been to a European election count, it's an incredible operation.
In Cork this week on top of a plastic floor that conducted static electricity so well that it turned every handshake or contact with the guard rail into a minor shock, dozens of staff drafted in for the week worked through 713,000 ballots for five full days.
In three rows in the sports hall at Nemo Rangers, paper ballots were sorted by whether the first preference was in the top 12 or bottom 11 candidates and then sorted into pigeon holes, before being manually counted into stacks of 50, which were then put into bundles of 20 making 1,000 votes and stacked onto a table or put into a plastic mail bin.
As a spectator sport, it appears rudimentary but there is a uniqueness to being able to step on a metal guard rail and attempt to count piles of votes, which will decide our representatives in Europe, laid out on a folding table in a hall which should be used for GAA camps this week.
But much has been made about the speed with which Ireland came to a final result, the last MEPs being elected in Midlands North West in the early hours of Friday morning, coming close to a week elapsing between voting opening last Friday and a result.
A number of people who were glued to social media and the news hoping for news of elections began to grow weary and switch off as it became apparent that in both Midlands North West and South the counts would be measured in days, not hours.
Why, people asked, was Ireland the second country on the continent to vote, but the last to know who had been elected? Why was our body politic — and media — focused on counts for so long while the affairs of the nation carried on? And, many asked, is there a way to change it?
Let's start with the why.
As you are no doubt aware, Ireland uses Proportional Representation - Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV) for its elections. The system is designed, in principle, to give people a broad choice at election times and to allow for more representation of voices and opinions.
Proponents point to the increasingly divided nature of politics in the UK and the US as proof that this system is more pluralistic and wards off binary divisions. But even those strongest proponents would acknowledge the system's biggest drawback — it is laborious to count.
Take your ballots from last week as an example. If you were voting anywhere other than Limerick, you will have been given two ballots. In Limerick, you'll have had three. You went to your polling station, showed your ID or polling card, voted and put those ballots in the same box.
Those boxes were supervised overnight in your polling place and transported to your local count centre in the morning. At 9am, the boxes were opened and ballots sorted into local, European and Limerick mayoral piles.
Those piles not being counted on Saturday — for Europe and Limerick — were then put back into boxes, which were sealed once more and, if not already there, were transported to one of three count centres — the RDS Simmonscourt (though Dublin's were already there or in the Main Hall just across the road), the TF Royal in Castlebar or Nemo Rangers with its static shocks.
Those boxes were opened on Sunday at 9am, when the count actually begun, but it was not until Monday night that a first count — literally just counting of number 1s in boxes on the ballots — had come and Sean Kelly was elected.
Then began the process of counting all of his 122,777 votes, working out what percentage each of the remaining 22 candidates took in number 2s and distributing 8,016 of them proportionally, before independent candidate Ciaran O'Riordan was eliminated with 2,477 votes or around 0.36% of the vote.
In total, eight of the 23 candidates in Ireland South did not reach 10,000 first preferences and, of those, only Rabharta's Lorna Bogue took more than 1% of the overall vote.
Each count of those eliminated candidates takes around an hour and 20 minutes, give or take, which prompted the Green Party's Ed Davitt, part of outgoing MEP Grace O'Sulliivan's team on site, to ponder if it is simply too easy to get on the ballot?
To be included in the Ireland South mix last week, you had to fulfil one of three criteria: be nominated by a registered political party, pay a deposit of €1,800 or obtain 60 signatures supporting your nomination from the public.
That is a low bar for entry. It was pointed out that many student politicians are required to get 500 nominations to run for student union positions, but any attempt to alter it by increasing it upward, or increasing the size of the deposit, could make our politics less open to non-party candidates or those with vast resources.
Likewise, changes to how we vote would have to be balanced against the current system. The notorious e-voting machines failed because of concerns about privacy, security and reliability.
Security remains an issue and last year in the US nearly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organisations raised the alarm about security of voting machines used there, saying the software breaches have “urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond".
In Ireland, it is hard to argue that a vote has been stolen because it is physically possible to see your ballot (if you recognise your writing) come out of the box used in your polling place and then see it go to the candidate for whom you've voted.
Ireland's system is longwinded and complex. But it is transparent and accurate. Anything that proposes to replace it needs to be the same, even if it takes days of waiting for an answer.
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