2022 Seanad by-election

Chu is unlikely to get enough of a split of the transfers to climb ahead of Gaffney/Clonan now. McNeill won't get that many transfers.

Transfers from the various left wing candidates beneath her are likely to break similarly to the first count, e.g. more to Gaffney than Chu.

The second lowest candidate was a joke candidate (as in running as a joke) so those transfers are not the best to try analyse!

Some things of interest to come now - will Barry's votes go heavily to Quill on party lines, or not (I expect not) and where will be the ~1000 votes that the two anti-EU candidates are likely to have at elimination go.

No obvious Barry->Quill party transfer, Clonan continues closing on McNeill (but there's still enough votes amongst the various left women to overtake these significantly)

Next elimination would have been a double but for three votes - candidates on 220, 222 and 440

The candidate just eliminated ran for the Greens in 2020, but party votes don't really matter here as we've just seen.

Looking at the count I think Hazel Chu has an outside chance here

Roseingrave, Mckenna, O'Neill, Stocker and Quill could all swing it to Chu

I heard a tally of O'Neills number 2 transfers went way over 40% to Chu

Going on William Quill's spreadsheet (he hasn't tweeted the summary yet), Gaffney got more of McKenna's transfers than Chu; Bassett now out.

edit:

McNeill and the bin (non transferable) to be the main winners, I'd expect.

I thought they'd take more than Chu from McKenna, which they did combined (32+32 vs 60) at least.

Spreadsheet reading pre-Quill tweet again - MacNeill and Clonan the main recipients of Bassett's votes. Oluborode out. Gaffney eked a tiny bit further ahead of Chu

MacNeill only leads by 7 now and I expect that to end on the next count.

Its all left or left-ish women to go out now; but both Chu and Gaffney are potential recipients for that vote. And Clonan of course; he can't be entirely written off.

You have to have a horse worth at least £5.

It's mad that such a rotten borough can exist in a modern democracy tbh, and I say that as someone who had a vote here.

Three of them have run as Greens in other races (Chu, O'Neill and Roseingrave); one is a member of the lawyers environmental group (Oluborode).

Its mathematically possible for it not to come to that... but it probably will.

The Irish electorate voted in the 7th amendment of the Constitution in 1979 to extend a Seanad vote to all graduates, but this has never been legislated for.

Iirc a few others has bits in their literature about climate and biodiversity. A good few had stuff in there about gender issues as well. While the above are important issues, they are hardly the most pressing facing the country right now. That said, maybe that speaks more about an electorate that has the luxury to worry about these kinds of things while the rest of us deal with a housing and cost of living crisis. Only a few mentioned education, which is a bit mad considering it is a university seat.

Decent split for Chu on Oluborode's votes. Clonan now leading.

Counts should be quite a bit slower from now on, decent jump in vote volumes. (once they've done Stocker's 657, which I forgot had to be done first...)

Ironically, the only (IIRC) candidate to mention those issues was the "joke" candidate.

https://www.tcd.ie/seanad/candidates/meetcandidates/Candidate%20Bios/Michael%20McDermott.php

He is running on a loosely-assembled platform of abolishing the Seanad from within and being a voice for current students and the recently graduated who can’t seem to find any accommodation in Dublin because there’s too many hotels in the way. This group is mostly ineligible to vote in this election so it’s clearly something he believes in rather than a shrewd electoral strategy.