Grappling with the ridiculous 27-candidate, 73cm-long Midlands-North-West ballot paper, this voter decided on some instant gratification. A firm 27 beside the most obnoxious candidate before voting upwards through the (theoretically) less rabid contenders. Keeping the far-right out of any count permutations for as long as possible seemed at least as important as voting for favourites.
The plan worked well enough until the pencil hovered over number 12 – and the realisation that it was going by default to a man with a rancid political history at least as obnoxious as number 20. A useful number 11 was also about to go to a pleasant party candidate with as much political nous as a Jack Russell.
So I started to work my way down from number 1 instead, arriving back at number 12. A final review revealed that I had awarded two number 12s. And that I now ranked among that much derided category of bumblers who spoil their vote.
The fact is that any civic-minded effort to vote through the list is going to result in that clammy moment when you find yourself voting for bigots, racists, varying degrees of know-nothings and bewildering names.
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In a nearby cubicle another benighted voter was reading through the ballot paper, hissing the names audibly and with growing exasperation. It takes a certain confidence to hold your nerve in a constricted little space with neighbours beyond the curtain wondering what’s keeping you.
My vote was salvaged but there are lessons from the outing. Never vote from the bottom up in a 2.5ft-long ballot paper. Bring a magnifying glass (especially if you’re squinting for women candidates in a crammed field of anti-immigrant males) and more importantly, an eraser. Candidates with surname initials beyond the middle of the alphabet should change their names now.
As the population ages, voters conscious of their dwindling time on Earth may just plump for any acceptable names near the top. Ditto all younger cohorts with decreasing attention spans. Up to recent years, many voters easily identified their preferred candidate by the party badge or colour, but such signals are increasingly lost among the vast variety of Independents and small parties, challenging all but the fully-informed and the cognitively limber.
It’s a fact that top positioning on the paper gets more votes. University College Cork academics Theresa Reidy and Fiona Buckley found evidence of this “primacy effect” using data from an experimental election study. More surprising was their finding that candidates in the middle of the paper get the lowest vote share of all. In a lengthy ballot paper, the implications are serious. Ballot design should not confer advantage on any candidate. Nine years ago Reidy and Buckley were already recommending randomisation.
The confusion doesn’t end there. In Ireland South alone, thousands of ballots were left entirely blank. Another 15,000 were discarded as so-called “Kiely ballots”, whereby voters start their vote with a one and two on the local ballot, for example, and continue their preferences on the European ballot with a three and a four.
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The “Kiely ballot” is named for former senator Dan Kiely who lost a local election by two votes and challenged the returning officers’ decision to allow the threes to be counted as ones etc. The Supreme Court sided with him as a matter of law (as opposed to returning officers’ judgment) and he won a recheck. But 15,000 in one constituency is a stunning number.
Sometimes the system metes out its own harsh lessons; this time it was to the many Sinn Féin voters led to believe in 2020 that candidates not elected on the first count were somehow illegitimate. That’s one kind of voter education. The blank sheets and the Kiely ballots need another. To know that such large numbers of votes are jettisoned without a robust education drive is disturbing at least.
The ridiculous ballot paper sizes are triggering fresh discussions about new electoral systems among political scientists. Some are proposing hybrid versions of the list system and electronic counting customised, of course for the Irish love of the slow burn. The unwieldy, confusing, even intimidating ballots – now apt to deter rather than promote democratic choice – have also prompted thoughts on the ease of access for anyone with a notion to run for the European Parliament.
The Green Party’s Ed Davitt generated a small ruckus this week by saying it’s time to look critically at just how easy it is. To recap: anyone with a) €1,800, b) a registered party nomination, or c) 60 signatures can get access to an electorate of more than 700,000. By contrast, a student seeking to run for UCD Students’ Union executive must have at least 150 nominations.
According to Davitt, members of the special election assessment mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights were quite shocked to hear about the ultra low criteria for access here, which sit well outside the European norm.
Some fear the idea or even discussion of any controls that may limit choice. Davitt is clear that he doesn’t want access overly-constricted but also that it shouldn’t be used to try to bolster local election runs or to facilitate interference with bona fide candidates by people only prepared to order the free leaflet drop.
How to separate those categories is the issue.
