Electoral systems discussion

Your last three are not problems that, in any sense, need to be solved.

Your second point relates only to transfer of votes exceeding the quota. How inaccurate is our present system? What proportion of votes are transferred from a surplus? I think recounts show that this 'problem' only rarely comes into play.

Your first 'problem' could be valid, if there was were some reason why time for a traditional count was not available. The end of the world perhaps. Otherwise, in setting the the dates of the vote, the count and the date for the Dáil to reconvene, the time for the count is more than adequately factored in.

I still think you are suggesting solutions for a problem that , for the most part, does not exist.

Perhaps. But my reading of the Irish Electoract act , is that it is a single transferable vote

Quote from Act

"…the poll shall be taken according to the principle of proportional representation, each elector having one transferable vote.

(2) In this section “transferable vote” means a vote which is—

(a) capable of being given so as to indicate the voter's preference for the candidates in order, and

(b) capable of being transferred to the next choice when the vote is not required to give a prior choice the necessary quota of votes, or when, owing to the deficiency in the number of the votes given for a prior choice, that choice is excluded from the list of candidates."

Different legislation applies (Seanad Electoral (Panel Members) Act, 1947) and for counting purposes each vote is multiplied by 1000.

The extra booths were probably a consequence of the ridiculously long ballot paper - people were taking much longer to vote than before.

Not sure what the relevance of burquas is, perhaps you can explain?

For the EU elections in particular, the barrier to entry is ridiculously low. Constituencies with electorates of over a million and only a very small deposit or endorsement from a few dozen voters required. Candidates need to have genuine commitment to the process and skin in the game. It was said at the time that some student union elections were harder to secure a nomination for than the European Parliament elections, which is completely daft.

It appears some were not interested in being elected or campaigning at all but just (ab)using the nomination and election process to get their propaganda piece into hundreds of thousands of homes at extremely low cost. There was one religious nutcase in Dublin in particular whose leaflet, distributed at taxpayer expense, was Virgin Mary this, Fatima that. It occurred to me that he had no interest in actually being elected at all.

No credible campaign can be run without money and the deposit is less (probably much less) than the cost of the "free" leaflet dropped into every home it gets you. That's an abuse of the system and needs to be stopped.

If anyone still wanting e-voting?

The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them

Organizers and participants at the DEF CON Voting Village found cyber vulnerabilities in everything from voting machines to e-poll books, but there is no time before the November elections to fully implement their findings.

LAS VEGAS — Some of the best hackers in the world gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year’s election — all with an eye to helping officials identify and fix vulnerabilities.

The problem? Their findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before Nov. 5.

If the US with the resources they have can't fix the machine's, what hope would Ireland have to do so?

Ah yes remember when the "certified software system to crunch the data tables" turned out to be an unsupported version of Microsoft Access?

We have an extremely open, transparent, and most importantly trustworthy voting and counting system - we have nothing whatsoever to gain from changing that and a great deal to potentially lose.

The barrier to entry for the EU elections (number of signatures from voters) was lower than some student union elections. That is just farcical so the answer is pretty obvious.

Candidates who see the electoral process as a bit of a laugh or (especially with the leaflet into everyone's home) a means of promoting whatever crackpot agenda consumes their life will be no loss to the democratic process.

A good third of those candidates really shouldn't have been there.

In Dublin 9 candidates of 23 received less than 1% of first preferences

In South, 7 of 23, in Midlands-NW 10 of 27 (one of them didn't even get 0.1%)

The most efficient would be if you could limit it to just one candidate. Count would be so quick. And eventually you could get rid of ridiculous elections and counts altogether.

So only wealthy people get to run for election?

Ballot papers are anonymised anyway, so there is nothing to be done to anonymise the vote. The problem is that a voter could effectively choose a unique pattern of preferences, and then use that pattern to identify their individual vote in the mix. This opens up the system to vote selling and duress voting.

delete

Who would be bothered buying a vote?

Someone who wants to influence the outcome of the election.

And for what purpose?

To influence the outcome of the election.

Who would be bothered selling a vote?

Someone who wants money.

There are serious protections built into the current system to prevent vote selling or duress voting. That's why you can't sign your vote or write on your vote or draw a symbol or logo on your vote. You can't do anything to identify your vote, because if you can identify your vote, you can sell your vote - or you can be put under duress by a family member or an employer or someone in your community.

Eliminating such protections would be very dangerous.

Seriously?

The current system prevents vote selling buying by design, and you don't see the obvious connection between that design and the absence of vote selling convictions?

Exactly - millions of voters in FPTP in the UK are disenfranchised because they live in a 'safe' seat for a party they abhor, so they might as well make a protest vote out of it.

This thinking then fed into the Brexit vote… not everyone who voted Leave wanted to leave.

But, by definition, it has to be a unique pattern of preferences, so you could only use this to identify one bought vote. To win the election corruptly, you're going to need to buy more than one vote — a lot more — and you'll need a different unique pattern of preferences for each vote that you wish to buy.

Actually spotting all of those in a manual count is impossible. At no point are all the preferences on a ballot paper examined together; in each count the scrutioneer is only looking to identify the effective preference and put the ballot paper in the correct pile; the 27 preferences below it are not relevant and the ballot paper just isn't displayed for long enough for an election observer to note and record all the preferences.

(Of course, if you had an electronic counting system, then all the preferences on the ballot paper would be scanned and recorded together, so if you had access to this system, you could identify all the ballots with unique preference patterns. So, if this argument carries any weight at all, it's an argument against automated counting systems.)

If you're not the corrupt politician who has bought the vote, even if you spot the unique pattern and even if you conclude that the most likely explanation for this pattern is that the vote was bought, you'll have no way of identifying who cast the vote. Only people actually involved in the corrupt transaction can know that.

The whole point about voting is that, while your identity is secret, your vote is public — it has to be, or it can't have any effect on the outcome of the election, which would defeat the whole point of voting.

The first preference on every ballot paper will be counted and the numbers published, and your first preference, or mine, will be reflected in the numbers published. The second preference on many ballot papers will be counted and reflected in the published numbers — exactly how many depend on how the count unfolds. And so on — every preference you write down may be counted and the result published. If you vote for no-hope candidate A, who is eliminated on the first count, and then transfer to no-hoper B, eliminated on a later count, and then no-hoper C, eliminated still later, everyone will know the number of ballot papers who gave thei first four preferences to A, B, C, someone else, in that order, and yours will be one of those papers.

In short, every preference you write on the ballot paper is potentially knowable to the world; some at least of them will be actually known. The only thing that isn't knowable is that you are the person who cast this particular vote.

Given all that, I'm not sure that making data from ballot papers avialable for research or scrutiny violates any fundamental principle. The only thing that's secret about your vote is your identity; nothing else. In particular, the details of how the vote was cast are not secret at all.

We need not be concerned that, even if you have ordered your preferences in a unique way, that you can be identified. Your vote can be identified as unique, but it can't be identified as your vote unless you make it known to someone that that is how you cast your vote, in which case the person who has disclosed your identity as the voter who cast this ballot is you.