Spoiled votes - Dublin South Central

gavmcg92

Hey all,
I was at the count yesterday in the RDS. It was my first time at the count, let alone my first time voting.
I got there for 3pm so that I would be there in time to listen to the first count and to support a friend of the family (Eric Byrne LAB). 3pm went by and there was no sign of any finish... Counts started coming in from Dublin North, Dublin South-East etc.
Hours and Hours of waiting went by with no sort of 1st count in sight... Eventually we had to go up to the overseer to see what the problem was. It was discovered that there was over 3,000 spoiled votes that needed to be examined by "one" solicitor.
It took more than 3-4 hours for this to be cleared and finally at 12.45am the "first count" was finally called.
My question after this is...

Why don't people read the instructions on the top of the ballot paper? There was over 30 counters sitting around doing nothing while waiting for these papers to be cleared!
Now, just to clarify these papers were not the "spoiled votes" that you might think of. Examples of the papers I saw were like people marking 1, 2, 3 and then putting X's in every other box... people putting 16, 32 and 43 instead of 1, 2, 3.

Why aren't the counters given an opportunity to use their brain!

Other than that rant I would like to say that I really enjoyed my night.. I will always remember my first election.

nesf

Excluding a vote because it's spoiled is a very serious matter and there is a very blurred line between what's a valid vote and what's a spoiled vote. Unfortunately it's absolutely necessary for a legal person to go over each paper to decide whether a vote should count or not.

It also varies constituency to constituency what gets counted.

Sir Oxman

The RTE site is quoting 817 as actual spolied votes so yes, the legal examination of 3000 was warranted (it is actually 5/6 times higher than normal for DubSC and for most other constituencies)