European Parliament Elections 2024 - Friday, June 7th

If i was her, regardless of the result, i'd give the GE a shot. For a green she speaks some common sense and comes across 6 zillion times better than Ryan, Martin or that idiot O'Gorman.

Well other countries do offer early voting, postal voting, and voting in absentia.

Postal voting is available but only to a very select few in Ireland. We don't offer any of the rest. Which is my general point. If you park the e-voting debate, why don't we offer the above? Is it a technology thing, or is it a 'we can't be arsed' thing, as 'if it aint broke dont fix it'.

When the turnout is <50% (which I think will happen) we will have debates on how to get more people out to vote, and the obvious solutions will be staring people in the face.

E-Voting is done in other countries when it comes to different elections though.

Norway allows online voting, from anywhere in local referendums.

Belgium uses it, as do the Australians and Swiss for some elections.

The French allow e-voting for those living abroad, again something we don't do or offer. (One of the few in the world who dont, the EU has called us out on that).

I know that, all i'm saying is she'd be more of a leader than any of the other names i mentioned. Although i wasn't aware the Greens had a TD down there

But what do you believe that an MEP and/or a County Councillor can do about Mental Health services?

Amusing to think Funchion is probably the safest SF candidate! I do think Lynn will be ok but she's is not someone I would be putting much money on.

The other candidate to keep an eye on down South is John Mullins, if FG are flying in the polls and with Kelly on top of the ticket he has a chance if admittingly small.

I am curious to see how Blighe does as well, he won't win a seat but out of all the hard right lads he seems to have somewhat broken through to the masses somewhat.

Something curious I've noticed is a lot of friends and family have used UL's tool whichcandidate.ie to see who their views align with on major EU issues and have been surprised to find Mick Wallace at the top or near the top.

Not sure how it'll translate but it feels like deja vu seeing Mick being lambasted and ridiculed by our media so often that he's being counted out by the public only for him to get re-elected anyway.

Well they should do something about it , Ireland has just over 400 suicides a year and unfortunately the services get the least amount of funding in the budget every year, not asking for a major change but even a a little one will make a difference to thr current situation

A lot of talk about Mullins. Eddie Punch too has a lot of chatter.

They could all be in the running for that final seat.

The final seat in Ireland South is to be between Punch, Wallace (I hope not), O'Sullivan, Mullins, and possibly McNamara but I think he will be home and dry in 4th place. The FF NI Murichu transfers could help Mullins a lot.

God, that fiasco!

A fella here got a huge sum of money to store just some of them. He got the contract by dubious means. Cost the state to buy him out of the contract too.

Not a bad suggestion, but again, you will have detractors who love to sit in count centres for 5 days for the craic.

Maybe if attempts at introducing tech at elections was done competently and without the cronyism and dubious tendering etc the people would have confidence in it.

If you have evidence of such when it came to the e-voting trial in 2002, do share it with us.

Too often there are calls and howls of indignation from people, who wouldn't know a mouse from a keyboard, about corruption, cronyism and the usual perpetual cynicism that infects Irish politics. It's very often why we have no vision greater than fixing the odd pothole, because everyone is quick to shoot down any idea, especially when it comes to any technology project.

And forgot to mention this bizarre censorship period we're in now where broadcasters are not allowed to mention the election. Nuts.

If you count the votes electronically, then you will end up with a file of ballots. Back in 2002, there were spreadsheets containing the ballots published for the 3 Dáil constituencies which used e-voting.

The vast number of combinations of votes possible using STV makes it easy to "sign" your vote.If I were to tell you in advance that a particular combination of preferences would appear on the ballot list, it would be very easy for you to check the list after the election and identify my vote. The chances of anyone else using the same combination is so small as to be irrelevant.

There are 25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000 ways of voting 1-23 for all the candidates in Dublin - and that's much less than half the available combinations. There is another 25 million billion billion ways of voting 1-22 and leaving 1 space blank, etc.

PS Northern Ireland does fractional counting manually. It does not require computers.

I agree with you. There was technical criticism of those machines they bought afair (it is a very long time ago so may be misremembering?), that they were too black box and did not create enough of an audit trail to do any verification later if there was some questioning of results.

The hoopla around it was no good reason to throw the hands up, give up and say that's it - there will be no electronic voting for us (effective outcome given its now approx. 20 y later)!

You are right, this country and its people are extremely conservative and frightened by change in general, esp. technological change in processes and admin.

The introduction of Eircode is another example. I don't think people would be without it now but amount of screeching, the public rows about it + claims of what a waste of money it was etc. before it came in was crazy. Thank God they pushed on with it, and got it done anyway.

Well stay off Facebook because it's saturated with propaganda,,,if I go on politics.ie I can't access it without a full page advertisement for a candidate.