European Parliament Elections 2024 - Friday, June 7th

It is literally there in black and white.

The higher a candidate's position, the more preferential votes a candidate receives (Geys and Heyndels, 2003, Miller and Krosnick, 1998). However, while it has been proven that ballot list position matters,

There are other studies too that have shown this.

In their study of the 1973 Irish general
election, Robson and Walsh (1974: 191-203) found that candidates placed higher on
the ballot enjoyed a "distinct advantage" over their fellow candidates. They analysed
the number of votes gained by candidates of the same parties according to their
position on the ballot, and found that candidates placed at the top of the ballot
received more votes than their party colleagues. Their study also showed that position
effects were more prominent among non-incumbents than among incumbents.

https://cora.ucc.ie/server/api/core/bitstreams/200ee941-7d47-4cff-89b0-ebe5c0d37aa9/content

So the question is, are you ok to leave this built-in advantage for some candidates, now knowing that it's unfair?

Or would you be open to changing it?

Only? I dont think so as its an unprovable point but it did help, it was a nice trick he played all the same. Begs the question, why he pulled it in the first place, eh? ;)

Do you have to eliminate candidates 1 by 1 or could Dublin have just culled the bottom 5 or 6 at the same count ?

Sometimes you can eliminate 5 at a time - 5 people with ~100 votes and the next person up has over a thousand, not one elimination can affect that person being overtaken so all 5 can go

The Dublin numbers do not work out like that.

Belgian elections where they can vote first for a party, then you either agree with the preset candidate ordering or you can rearrange based on your preferences.

The party sets the ordering according to their best candidates who they want elected, I..E the most experienced. The results of that study are no surprise at all.

In Belgium you can only vote for one party in the same election. You cast a vote in the box above the party list (saying you agree with the order of candidates) or you cast your vote on the boxes behind one or more individual candidates on that list (saying you want to change the order of the list). List votes go to the first candidate on the list (and to the second when the first has reached his or her quota, etcetera…).

The total number of ballot forms cast for each party list forms the basis for the calculation of the seats distribution. Once those seats have been attributed to each party, the number of preferential votes (including the re-distributed list votes) indicates which individual candidate on the list is elected.

I strongly disagree with those advocating retaining the present manual system of voting and counting.

It really is laughable that we cannot produce a result within hours or minutes of the polls closing. Think of all the resources and time wasted with all this manual counting.

it is not a diminution of democracy if the count is conducted using automated means. Trends and transfer patterns can still be gleaned from the data, just in a much quicker fashion. The results are already determined when the polls close. The present system just delays the notification of those results to the public, not to mention the potential for human errors.

Dr Umar wouldn't exactly be the most friendly to lgbt or Jews.

The crossover by just 9 isn't that far fetched.

Only 43% turnout in Dublin. Terrible. And a large number of spoiled votes.

So many people don't understand how to vote in Irish elections.

They have been moving at pace from the former to the latter.

Really (?). I would not be one of their voters and admit have not been paying attention to the party + what its people have been saying recently. Don't believe I even got a leaflet off them funnily enough now I think of it.

Aontú are definitely conservative, but you couldn't really describe them as 'right wing populists'. A lot of them are Irish nationalists and originally from a left wing background.

How is it laughable? It's a tried and tested method. No need to sign up to contracts with companies, retaining them even in non-election years either.

In 2015 in NSW, Australia, 60,000 electronic votes were compromised by a third party website while a poll was ongoing.

In 2003 in Belgium, a candidate got an extra 4000 first preference votes and it was only discovered because of a physical impossibility (ie, more total first preference votes than people who voted)

In 2018 local elections in Ontario, 51 local elections areas could not access the system and all the voters in that area had to be pushed back to voting the next day.

In 2008 in Finland, a court ruled electronic votes invalid following possible errors and it was re-done with paper and pen. The Finns have kept it paper and pen since.

In 2009 the Constitutional Court in Germany ruled there was a lack of public involvement/transparency with exciting results. There's no evoting.

There are numerous other examples of doubt/hacking/ or simply abandonment by many countries, including many EU countries I could continue listing.

And...is it really that much quicker? With a presidential election or referendum, we know the results the next day anyway.

Go on twitter now or any mainstream news site, you can follow along in a transparent manner, there's photos of the counting sheets and carry-overs for everyone to inspect.

It's reliable and transparent and...it's not broken. It works.

If we were to go evoting and something went wrong either technologically, maliciously or legally (resulting in a court deeming the system invalid) the absolute uproar there'd be over wasted money and we're fools etc etc (even though many other countries have been victim of the same)

The only person I would understand who feels very strongly on pursuing evoting are the machine manufacturers and software companies.

Yeah its an interesting point, and to be honest there would have been a bit of an alignment between far right sentiment and hard core nationalist (anti Brit) sentiment - in my opinion. Am sure others will disagree and obviously Sinn Fein is closely aligned with Palestine and so on, but its just a sense I have - that (some of) the same people who are strongly nationalist, might also be anti-immigrant.

Then when Mary Lou made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with far right causes, these voters moved on - and to be honest she should be glad of that even if it means lower polling numbrs.

One thing that the Far RIghters keep banging on about is 'the Irish people'.

Having said that, a counter argument to O'Toole is that the far right is very fragmented, whereas Sinn Fein if it had played its cards right would be in government right now.