It’s hard to pick a highlight of this most dull of election campaigns. It only sparked into life – albeit briefly – twice. The first occasion was when Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who is not seeking election to anything, slagged off teachers whilst helping launch the campaign of his local Fine Gael TD. His trademark off-the-cuff trolling was taken both literally and seriously by a political and media class that really should have known better.
The second brief flare-up followed Simon Harris ticking off disability worker Charlotte Fallon in a supermarket whilst the cameras were rolling. This and his subsequent grovelling passed for a defining moment of the campaign.
Apart from these two utterly non-seismic political moments, the three weeks have dragged by in a yawn-inducing succession of manifesto launches, TV debates and halfhearted “gotcha” journalism. But such is the price of democracy and we are lucky to have it.
Anyway, opinion polls show that people’s voting intentions are pretty much where they stood before the campaign started; most of them feel they are being presented with a choice as to who they want to be the third leg of the next Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition: the Greens, Labour or some assortment of Independents. The real takeaway from polls is that many people cannot see a better alternative or even the need for one. It would be a stretch to say they are happy with the outgoing Government.
In truth, most just want it to be over. It could and should all be over within a few minutes of the polls closing on Friday but instead it will drag on over the weekend – at least – in a uniquely Irish form of political theatre known as “the counts”.
Over the next few days, something in the region of 3.5 million ballot papers will be sorted, counted and recounted by hand. If we are lucky it might all be over early next week. If not, it could be weeks before it’s finally done and the last recount competed. Thankfully, the equally tedious business of government formation will have got going before this, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could be affected by the last vote recounted on the last day by hand.
So why do we as a nation put ourselves through this when we could know the result within hours of the polls closing and crack on with forming the government?
It’s certainly not a lack of suitable or affordable technology. Electronic voting is widely used and the cost of the machines incidental for a rich country such as ours.
Fans of the manual counts argue that in some intangible way the spectacle enhances the public trust in democracy by letting the public see – if they can be bothered – their votes manually counted in a public forum. Others say that it is a ritual deeply embedded in our political and wider culture; part of what makes us who we are, etc. This argument has the merit of not pretending that there is any rational reason for counting votes by hand. But at the same time, you can’t help feeling that if it is a drama, it as an amateur production put on for the benefit and enjoyment of the actors rather than the audience. But what harm? Don’t they deserve their fun after the hard work they put in on the election trail? Maybe, but it’s just more evidence of our natural tendency to a lack of seriousness in public life.
The most compelling explanation for the continued use of manual counts is that the political parties still want them. In fact, they want them so much that they all went along with a farcical traducing of the integrity of electronic voting that saw more than 7,000 voting machines costing more than €50 million bought in 2004 being scrapped in 2012 for €70,000.
The reason for this incident of national idiocy seems to be the extraordinary wealth of information that parties glean from observing the counts. Party members – either separately or together – closely observe the opening of ballot boxes and the sorting and counting of votes by hand in the count centres. The information they gather – when combined with other data – is extremely valuable and put to use in subsequent elections. It’s unclear whether this information could or would be available with electronic voting but if it was, presumably every party would get the same details. Then there is data protection regulation.
As things stand, the only direct benefit the average voter seems to get from all this is that if they live somewhere that the tallies show leans very heavily in favour of one party, then you don’t get as many random politicians calling to the door.