Is it undemocratic that a person with fewer votes than another can become Taoiseach

No, because what count you get elected on is irrelevant in STV

SF tried banging the drum about later count elected candidates in an attempt to undermine them; and its going to backfire horribly if they manage their vote properly next time and end up with piles of TDs elected late,.

No!

we dont vote for a Taoiseach - we vote for TDs. Leo has/had to be confirmed as Taoiseach by the dail to which he was elected.

democracy at work, as designed.

How is the Taoiseach elected?

Overview. Under the Constitution of Ireland, the Taoiseach is nominated by a simple majority of the voting members of Dáil Éireann. They are then formally appointed to office by the President, who is required to appoint whomever the Dáil designates, without the option of declining to make the appointment.

What if you grew up in a "socially deprived" area (i.e. an area that gets loads of money but the locals insist on pis$ing any potential opportunities up against a wall) but you decided to push ahead and better yourself and went out and got educated/qualified/trained and still wanted to live in your own community as an example of what can be achieved?

Obviously, having been educated, you are likely going to veer away from your PBPs and SFs etc should you wish to run for office to help effect some change. So you run for a different party or none. You likely aren't going to get the vote of the anything-but-British-ohh-ahh-up-the-ra-Celtic-and-ManU-jersey-wearers-kill-the-bankers-wheres-me-foreva-home voters. But imagine that despite those odds, you still get elected. It shouldn't mean that you are barred from a higher position just because of the density of density in your constituency

(density squared)

Because we have STV. Which it seems you completely don't understand.

The order in which someone is elected has absolutely no bearing on their position or legitimacy.

No because then the most popular party in any constituency could only run 1 candidate for fear of excluding their Leader from Taoiseach position by trying to bring in other party members.

Varadkar for example, had Emer Currie running beside him who took over 4% of the vote Varadkar otherwise would have got. In contrast in the last election SF stood single candidates inthat constituency so easier to top the poll.

Your suggestion could also rule out Taoiseach position for somebody just because a local independent protest vote or populist (see Healy Raes) tops their constituency on an entirely local issue.

no, because that is not how democracy works

+ we have STV

+ we don't elect the Taoiseach, the TDs do

Not at all. We have multi-seat constituencies. There are no prizes for being the first to be elected. The person who ends up topping the poll gets the same prize as the person who wins the last seat on the 15th count - a seat in the Dail. Anything beyond that is about local bragging rights and more often than not it comes down to different parties having different election strategies.

It's a lot easier to top polls when you don't have running mates. Most Sinn Fein candidates ran in constituencies on their own in 2020. That meant they didn't have to split the Sinn Fein vote with party colleagues in their constituencies. The same couldn't be said for FF and FG. They each ran at least 2 candidates in most constituencies. The net result of that is that Sinn Fein topped lots of polls but FF and FG were more efficient in maximising the number of seats that they won for the vote that they got - and that's what it's all about.

I guarantee that in the next election Sinn Fein will get a much larger number of votes but they will actually end up with fewer poll toppers around the country. That's because they'll be running way more candidates next time out.

If you're questioning its validity - no, you absolutely don't know how it works.

It is an exceptionally representative system, with the ability to boot out unlikable people (most PR systems use lists, which prevent this) and which returns fairly proportional results - particularly if most constituencies are 5 seats

But it works entirely on the idea that a seat is a seat and election order is utterly irrelevant. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the system.

You seem to be equating popularity with democracy.

You could argue that having a Dáil and Taoiseach at all is is undemocratic . I probably wouldn't be seen as democracy by the ancient Greeks, more a type of oligarchy, or maybe a limited form of tyranny, at least in practice. Bit imperfect as it is , it is probably as good an approximation as any modern country can get to democratic principles.

Yes.

Emphatically, no.

Also, our electoral system is very transparent and, I think, very fair. PRSTV is a great system and is much kinder to smaller parties than a FPTP system.

I also think it's nonsense to focus on how many counts a TD was elected on. If they were elected, they were elected. Often bigger parties manage their vote to maximise candidates returned. They are not concerned about 'topping the poll'. It's an election, not a pi$$ing contest.

Let's not pretend it's a perfect system either:

This is true but in many ways it's not ideal either. The fact that very few TDs are assured of getting elected in the next general election means that they are all hyper aware of local issues. This has 2 downsides:

1. They often behave more like local councilors then national legislators. Some of the independent TDs, in particular, don't even pretend to care about national issues and don't bother attending committee meetings or even asking questions in the Dail. Instead they'll devote their issue to dealing with things like fixing streetlights and making phone calls to the passport office for their constituents.
2. A local concentration of voters can have an outsize affect for an issue that only affects them - even if it's for the greater good of the wider area. A classic example is a residents committee opposing new housing in their area. Any politician that they contact generally will be supportive out of fear of losing a potential cache of votes at the next election. Every single party is guilty of this.

There's an argument that this is preferable to a system like ours where you have a collection of people who, more often than not, don't have any specialist knowledge, end up overseeing the running of a government department. A classic example was the appointment of Simon Harris, a man who dropped out of college in first year, as the minister for Higher Education.

Now, obviously the US system is open to patronage (e.g. Trump appointing Mitch McConnell's wife to be Secretary of Transportation) whereby you also end up with unqualified people running departments. However it's easier to find suitable candidates if you're not restricted to a small group of people, many of who's main talent is being electable.

People asking questions like the OP I think are generally coming from a place where they are too embedded in UK or American political media and for whatever reason seem to think their electoral systems somehow are more representative or "fairer" showing a complete ignorance of PR-STV. Like another person mentioned a lot of the recent ignorance to PR-STV is thanks to SFs utter mismanagement of their ballots which if they had done correcrtly they honestly might have come away with a majority of seats by themselves. However they didnt and simply got the most seats leading to this silly idea that they "won" the election whereas the parties who "won" the election are actually those who can cobble together enough seats to form a Government.

My favorite statistic to show those who don't understand this is a comparison for how unrepresentative FPtP is that the UK has in the last 100 years only have had 1 Government elected by the majority of the people ie popular vote and ironically it was a coalition which is more often than not what happens due to PR-STV. PR-STV is without a doubt the most representative and democratic voting mechanism available, is it perfect? No but its far far better than any of the other options.

We don't vote to elect the Taioseach we vote to elect TDs.

This isn't Murica.

This is a very sad reflection on the lack of knowledge of how our Democracy works.

Easiest way I can think about it. 3 seat constituency, 4 parties.

Party A gets 1.5 quotas.

Party B gets 0.8.

Parties C & D 0.6

If Party A runs two candidates. Scenario 1 they split the vote badly. First candidate gets 1.2 quotas second gets 0.3. They only get 1 seat. But they top the poll.

Scenario 2 they split the vote well, both candidates get 0.75 quotas. They get 2 seats but Party B top the poll.

So that's why I don't think topping the poll is that important.

This is the beauty of the PR system. It ranks the candidates in order of popularity. And being "popular" is absolutely not about how many first votes you get - it's about how you are ranked by everyone.

Take a simple system where you have 3 candidates, A, B & C.

A & B are both equally loved and loathed by exactly half of the population.

Candidate C is liked by everyone - he's not as loved as either candidate, but also not loathed either.

On ranking across the population, who is the "most popular". Well, clearly it's candidate C. More people like him than either A or B.

We tend to think that just because lots of people really, really like a candidate than that somehow makes them more popular than someone else who is just "mostly liked" by even more people. That's how celebrity works, but it's not how a democracy should work.