Voting method

My reading of it is that only the transfers that got Mary over the quota get proportionally redistributed.

So if Mary needed 1000 votes to reach the quota and got 2000, the 2000 would be recounted, those transfers halved, and then redistributed. I think 🙂

I usually fill in a preference for every candidate, like this

1, 12, 2, 11, 3, 10, 4, 9, 5, 8, 6, 7

I'm lucky, because in my constituency there is one absolute dickhead who I've always put last in GEs as long as I've been voting here. After that, there is a particular cohort of candidates that I'd have as low preference, then a few for higher preference.

The critical word is preference.

Your giving your vote to the candidate who offends you least.

If you don’t, you may be helping to elect the one who is more offensive.

I see their point in fairness, realistically the only way your vote could transfer to your 13th preference would be that a higher preference has already been elected in an earlier count.

So you could end up voting for someone you never had any intention of voting for. I would leave it blank too, if they get in on other votes fair enough, at least I would know it wasn't mine.

Their point is completely and utterly wrong. Their understanding of the vote system is mistaken at best, and rapidly coming across as more likely to be wilfully ignorant.

The entire point of giving a 13th preference is that there is a 14th (15th, 16th…) preference who is worse. Giving a 13th preference means you are making it less likely for those worse candidates to get in. If you stop at 12, then you are saying that you are unable to differentiate between the remaining candidates. An example: in the Dublin MEP elections, if you vote 1 through 12 and stop, and don't give a preference to Bríd Smith (PBP) because you don't like her economic leanings, your ballot is saying that you equate her election with the election of literal neo-Nazis (the National Party). You're saying those two scenarios have the exact same preference for you.

There were no photos on ballots prior to, erm, 1997 maybe; making the ballos a lot shorter, so it could have worked

Here's a sample 1985 LE ballot:

https://irishelectionliterature.com/2011/05/17/sample-ballot-paper-from-independent-fianna-fail-blaney-1985-local-elections-letterkenny-udc/

There were often also less candidates than there are now, far fewer Independents for one. Donegal was different back then, due to IFF and the Donegal Progressive Party (sort-of Unionists, actually got some seats) hence that is relatively long.

Was said teacher, by any chance, a councillor who relied on a lot of second preferences from someone vastly more popular to stay in?

@Larbre34 from your experience of counts if someone simply places an "X" in one candidate's box and leaves all the rest of them blank will that be counted the same as a #1 preference for that candidate?

If you live in MNW, its quite possible this time out for you to have a 10th preference or 10 people you'd prefer to the other 16; and a reasonable chance that votes will get that far.

I could see it going to 20 counts, there won't be many papers that move 20 times but there'll be a fair few that move a good bit.

@Larbre34 "If you don't especially want the person who would be your next choice to be elected, why would you give them a preference?"

I vote 1, 2, 3 for my preferred candidates, I might not care which of the next 5 gets my vote but there are 3 that I definitely DON'T want to get elected, so I'm going to vote all the way down the sheet.

If you look at some past election figures and add up the votes on the final count, that is the total of the quotas of the elected candidates and the total of the remaining candidates, you will find that that sum of less that that of the original valid poll. E.g out of an original valid pool of 50,000 in a 4 seat constituency, on the final count there are 3 seats fille with 10,001 votes each and there are 15,00o votes between the remaining candidates. That means 4,997 votes have been lost through the counts.
That is caused by plumpers, people who stop voting leaving more than 1 space blank.
Those people might have influenced who got the final seat had they used their full vote.

There's 3 FF, 2 FG, 2 SF, 1 LAB, 1 GP, 1 SD running in MNW; that's 10 going between the mainstream parties alone.

When there are lots of candidates, low preferences can and do get counted, frequently.

Yes stopping at 12 means you're unable to differentiate between the remaining or don't want your vote going to any of them, which everyone is perfectly entitled to do.

Your example is bit silly because there is a clear differentiation between them in terms of what your preference would be.

A better one is that 13 and 14 both represent a party that you would never vote for. Randomly deciding between them is really just an exercise in ensuring that your vote will eventually be counted and go to 'someone'.

For me if I only have a preference for say 8 candidates I will vote 1-8 only. If none of them get elected (unlikely) and I prefer my vote to die rather than go to anyone else, that's still a preference.

It's a real life scenario that has no comparison to what i'm saying, as that scenario has a clear difference between the two candidates that everyone would have a preference on, rather than two candidates from the same party that would have no clear difference between them.

Anyway we're essentially agreeing, vote in order of your preference as far as your preference goes up to where you have no preference. If you have no preference for any of the remainder then clearly you already don't think that one is worse than the other.

Yes. Its a clear preference and then becomes non-transferable.

But concern about many people's lack of knowledge around how to mark ballots is valid.

In any count centre, you'll end up with hundreds of spoiled votes, not intentionally, but marked X,X,X,X or 1,1,1,1 etc.

If a person makes a mistake by marking say 1,2,3,3,4, then the 1 and 2 will be counted and it then becomes non-transferable.

It should be reassuring though, at the count, exhaustive efforts are made to ascertain the voting intention of every vote, and in the case of tight counts, the candidate representatives will all pore over the individual votes together with the returning officer and try and agree what was intended. If agreement isn't reached, the vote is set aside.

Your third choice wasn't effective because your first choice was effective. My third choice was effective because my first choice wasn't.

Each of our votes contributed to the election of just one candidate, which is always the case — your vote can only ever be effective once. You helped elect your first choice candidate; I held elect my third choice candidate. Your vote has done more to acheive your objectives than my vote has done to acheive mine. How, exactly, did you "waste" anything?

The only concession I'll make is this: Suppose you're a committed supporter of the Blob Party, and your objective is to maximise the representation of the Blob Party. You don't care at all which Blob Party candidates are elected; as far as you are concerned they are all equally wonderful. But you're aware that other voters, less clear-sighted than you, don't necessarily take the same view.

In this situation, your optimal strategy is to vote for the Blob Party candidates in the reverse order of what you perceive to be their popularity — give your first preference to the BP candidate least likely to be elected, your second to the next least likely, and so on. When you have preferenced all the BP candidates, you can continue on to preference other candidates in the usual way (or not, if you wish). That way, you hope to postpone the elimination of the Blob Party's less popular candidates, maximising the chance of their being around to pick up preferences as the count proceeds (especially, to pick up surplus transfers when more popular Blob Party candidates are elected). The difference this makes is pretty marginal, but it could result in a Blob Party candidate being elected who would otherwise have been eliminated. But note that a very possible outcome of this strategy is that your vote won't contribute to the election of any candidate at all — you've given your first preference to an unpopular candidate who may stay in the race until the last seat is filled, and still not win that seat.

And this strategy, too, can be seen as waste. What have you wasted? You have wasted an opportunity to choose candidates based on their individual characteristics and, possibly, to influence the Blob Party by maximising the representation, within the party and within Dáil Éireann, of TDs whose positions or values are closest to your own. But, being the one-eyed Blobbist that you are, you won't see this as a waste; you'll have used your vote in the most effective way to maximise the representation of the Blob Party, which is your first objective.

Sounds like a bit of a legend — apart from anything else there weren't that many illiterate voters in the 1980s; the "gaps in the comb" method can't help with ordering preferences; and it's fatally vulnerable to the simple error of holding the comb (which is symmetrical) the wrong way around, or against the wrong side of the ballot paper.

The theory behind surpluses is, if a candidate has a surplus, then the surplus votes are not needed to get him elected (that's literally what "surplus" means — votes that the candidate doesn't need). Only the votes which are needed to get him elected are used to elect him. If this were not the case, you would be "wasting" a vote by giving it to a candidate who's a shoe-in anyway; he will be elected whether you vote for him or not. The risk of wasted is avoided by ensuring that, if your vote isn't needed to elect him, it won't be used to elect him.

Depending on the precise system of STV in use, there are different ways of identifying the particular votes which get redistributed but, if your vote is redistributed, then it wasn't used to elect the candidate who has been elected, and becomes effective for a lower-preferenced candidate.

The thread has certainly given me food for thought, especially about going deep into the preferences in the Dublin Euros election to try to keep a certain candidate out.

I've been watching this thread for a few days and I've come to the conclusion that there are some cynical people out there manipulating people. If your favourite candidate is one of the last two, then every vote counts. Similarly, if your **least** favourite candidate (even if you hate a few of them) is one of the last two, then every vote against them counts.

I think the "only give preferences to out party"-type policies might have previously been used in republican circles, both FF and SF, but for slightly different reasons. Back in the day, FF was all about 'one party government' and sharing anything with anyone or even acknowledging their existence was anathema to many paid-up members. With SF, part of them didn't want to be elected, although the last local elections and general election probably changed them.

This time around, I think the motivation of quite a few people is not to get elected, but to cause community disruption and to bring the elections into disrepute.

**Vote all the way down, as far as you can. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to manipulate you and the election.**