European Parliament Elections 2024 - Friday, June 7th

That thought is inkling in the contrary part of my mind as well

Is that in terms of number of voters? Or percentage?

Could be that the same total electorate figure was used to calculate the %? Hard enough to explain otherwise

This isn't as irrational as you might think. Remember that the votes being transferred now are not just of people who voted McHugh no. 1. Of the 31,000 tally being transferred, about 19,000 are McHugh no. 1 votes, and about 12,000 are people who put one or more other candidates above McHugh, but after 15 counts all those other candidates have been eliminated, so those votes have come to McHugh. So these are not necessarily people who are strong McHugh supporters.

Right. A rational strategy in an STV election with a lot of candidates — arguably, the most rational strategy — is to:

• identify the candidates that you favour; you'd like one or more of them to be elected; and also
• identify the candidates that you fear and/or loathe; you'd rather have anyone but them.

The rest of the candidates are people about whom you have no particular feelings, one way or the other.

Then you mark your paper by giving your highest preferences to the candidates you like, and then your next preference to the candidates you are indifferent about, and your lowest preferences or no preference to the candidates you hate. The thinking is that, if it comes down to a candidate you're indifferent about and an candidate you hate and fear, you'd rather the candidate you're indifferent about to be elected, so you give them a preference that reflects that.

But, as between all those meh candidates, you have no particular preference; you just want to give them all a higher prefernece than the shïts. So you order them randomly, possibly just by going down the ballot paper giving each of them your next preference.

And that's why a lot of the preferences that are currently with McHugh move next to Mullooly. Alphabetically, Mullooly is next on the ballot paper. The voters doing this may not think much of Mullooly, or indeed of McHugh, but they like them both more than they like Barrett, or Kelly, or whoever.

Eligibility to vote in Locals is different to European elections therefore it is not necessarily the same people voting in both elections (majority will overlap as shown in table below)

I would be against making the financial requirements too hefty. No need to make this about wealth. Or I guess it could potentially be a sliding scale of how much you get back (I e. Get back 50% if you get half the full refund amount) if it is increased.

Other requirements showing some level of support for the position can be changed first.

If the right figures out how to work as a team it will shorten massively. You will always get a few odd balls with no chance but the bottom of the ballot this time was dominated by various anti vaxer/anti immigrant etc. that they pretty clearly didn't have the vote for that many candidates

Id anticipate a high number of non-transferables from blighe

I'd guess that 'making it harder to get on the ballot' is possibly outside our control. It seems something that's likely decided/specified at EU level? Like it wouldn't be democratic to have a situation that getting onto the Irish ballot is 10x more difficult/expensive than getting on to Maltese or Latvian ballot, for what is ultimately an election to the same parliament.

Anyone know whether it is in our control?

Would people think that Nina Carberry is better known than Ciaran Mullooly? I am trying to gauge the party alignment aspect with the celebrity aspect. Personally I would have thought Mullooly was better known but I'm not interested in horses so I could be wrong on that. I still say that Carberry & Walsh got elected on a Mairead McGuinness FG vote. Fair enough Walsh is a sitting MEP but for FG to put in Carberry and basically hide her away from campaigning and still have her elected is both genius from FG since it worked and a damning report on us voters in MNW for putting up with it.

It's a bit of a joke. Celebrity politics. How effective will Carberry be in Europe given she couldn't even handle a debate?