Election 2024

When it comes to following the money at election time, don’t even try

Scanned, handwritten PDFs spread across multiple institutions is not acceptable in 2024 and does not enable accountability

Professional outdoor advertising, including things such as billboard and bus ads, cost even more; Fine Gael headquarters spent about €93,000 on these during the European elections. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd
Professional outdoor advertising, including things such as billboard and bus ads, cost even more; Fine Gael headquarters spent about €93,000 on these during the European elections. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd
Liz Carolan
Wed Nov 20 2024 - 07:05

Talk of money is everywhere in the election debate, mostly in the form of promises of bumper giveaways in the year ahead. We hear less about money being spent in the campaign by parties and candidates. This is at least in part because when it comes to political finance, following the money in Ireland is functionally impossible. This is corrosive to democratic trust and has to change.

In Ireland we have built a campaign finance system based on a combination of restrictions and transparency, designed to incentivise civic behaviour and expose misdeeds. Yet as someone who has tried to navigate it, I have found the system to be antiquated, dysfunctional and mind-bogglingly frustrating.

We may complain about being littered with leaflets and soundbites during this three-week period, but campaigning is one of the main ways that we as the electorate learn about who is running and what they stand for.

But campaigning isn’t free and even the most bootstrapped campaign will incur costs. Election posters cost about €8 each, plus a few euro more if you want to pay to have them hung. This adds up. Sinn Féin’s head office declared more than €160,000 in poster costs for the European elections, and Aontú claimed about €50,000. Professional outdoor advertising, including things such as billboard and bus ads, cost even more; Fine Gael headquarters spent about €93,000 on these during the Europeans. Then there are the leaflets, which need to be designed and printed, opinion polls, transportation, digital ads, newspaper ads, room hire and, for some, advisers or consultants.

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Paid campaigning is allowed, but with restrictions designed to maintain democratic integrity. Deep pockets should not allow you to crowd out other candidates, so spending in election periods is limited, and TV ads are not permitted. We want people with limited resources to be able to run for office, so we refund some campaign expenses, up to a threshold, if enough of the electorate vote for you. No one entity is supposed to have undue influence on our politicians, so we limit how much parties and candidates can take. We restrict these donations to people or entities either in Ireland or from here, to try to root out foreign interference. And while the State provides parties with public money, we do not allow this to be spent on electioneering. So far, so good, a solid set of principles built on democratic values. The main enforcement mechanism for these restrictions is transparency, and this is where the system starts to fall apart.

I have spent a decade thinking about data transparency as a means of achieving accountability. It can be a deeply effective tool.

If Meta can publish data on the ad space that it sells to candidates, why can’t the likes of JCDecaux or VistaPrint? Or, for that matter, newspapers?

But for transparency to work, data has to be findable, usable, timely and complete. Irish political finance data is none of that. For the local and European elections, spending data is spread across 32 different institutions; the Standards In Public Office Commission and the local authorities. It is unclear if all of these publish their returns online. Much of the data is not readily usable, it is in scanned documents that cannot be extracted to a spreadsheet, despite many attempts and expensive software subscriptions. The documents are compiled into single PDFs that are often hundreds of pages long. These documents are often not searchable, with much of the text hand written. I have even found scanned handwritten Post-it notes in political party declarations, text crossed out, or illegible scrawls in the margins. The timing of publication of this data is not fixed, or consistent across institutions. Declarations that are missing one day can appear appended to a 700-page PDF the next, without explanation.

Understanding donations and the sources of political finance is no easier, with few candidate donations requiring disclosure, and parties required to give financial accounts on an annual basis that lump sources of funding under broad headings.

Then there is the data we can compare these declarations to, the other side of the accountability ledger. There are reasons that candidates or parties might be tempted to hide some campaign expenditure – to get around limits on spending; to avoid declaring donations over the threshold or from unpermitted sources; or to pass off campaign expenses as ordinary party spending that public funds can cover.

Here, somewhat ironically, digital political ads have leapfrogged from being the most clandestine form of political campaign expenditure to the most transparent. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was so destabilising to trust in the Brexit and first Trump votes that tech companies were forced to introduce real-time libraries of political ads, with live data during the campaign of what parties and candidates are spending.

We now have a full accounting of what every party and candidate spent during the recent local and European elections on digital ads, and can track in real time what they are spending this week. For the first time we have a paper trail, in usable form, for the vendor side of the transaction for political campaign expenses. We can see what is being spent, and then we can compare it to what candidates and parties declare, to know if anything is being hidden.

But this kind of transparency leads to accountability only if the data is complete. For this to happen we need party and candidate finance data to be findable, usable and combinable. Scanned, handwritten PDFs across multiple institutions is not acceptable in 2024, and does not enable accountability.

It also means that we need to extend the vendor-side transparency to other types of campaigning expenditure. If Meta can publish data on the ad space that it sells to candidates, why can’t the likes of JCDecaux or VistaPrint? Or, for that matter, newspapers?

The political finance reporting system is, in my experience, actively hostile to investigation. This undermines our ability to hold political actors to account and eases the pressures on parties to play fair. Democratic systems survive only as long as people have faith in them, and the last decade of global politics has shown just how quickly that faith can crumble.

Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie