As the election approaches, we at Gript Media are here to answer any questions people have about the Irish voting system and the mechanics of how it works. We’ll start with this question, submitted to me via twitter yesterday:
Would love to see someone do an accurate breakdown of how Irish elections work, and what it takes exactly for someone to lose their seat. It is my understanding that simply not voting for someone and scattering our votes around randomly ISN’T enough to lose someone their seat?
The answer to this must begin with a basic fact: Elections are not referendums where there are simply two choices. There is no formal way to vote against a candidate. In fact, the system is designed to practically ensure that somebody you disagree with will take at least one of the seats in your constituency.
That said, there are ways to use your vote against a particular candidate should you wish to do so.
The simplest way to do this is to do what I always advise: Vote the whole way down the ballot paper, and rank the candidate you do not wish to see getting elected in the very last place. This ensures that your vote will always be available to whichever candidate your least preferred candidate is fighting for the last seat.
Or to put it in plain English: Let’s imagine that your least favourite candidate represents People before Profit, and that he or she is the candidate that you really don’t want to see elected. In that situation, it makes sense for you to give a preference to the Green Party candidate, the National Party candidate, and everyone else on the ballot paper. This means that if, at the very end of the count, the choice is between the People before Profit candidate and the Green Party candidate, your vote will go to the Green Party and help keep the People before Profit candidate out.
Basically, going down the ballot means you have a choice and a say in every contest that might emerge over who gets a seat and who does not.
This is the easiest way to harm a particular candidate’s chances with the limited means at your disposal.
However, there are many myths about this. For example, some people will tell you nonsensical things like “Your seventh preference is counted on the seventh count so you could elect someone you really don’t like by accident”.
This simply isn’t true. Your preference only goes to the highest ranked candidate on the ballot who has not already been elected, or eliminated. That means that if your seventh preference is being counted, the top six on your ballot are either already elected, or have been excluded from contention.
The ballot paper is essentially a series of questions. The first question is “who do you want to get elected?” Whomever your answer to that question is, you give them your first preference.
The second question is “If this person doesn’t get elected, who would you like to be elected instead?”
Whomever the answer to that question is, you give your second preference to. The third question is “and if these two don’t make it, who then?” And so on.
There are of course other ways you might consider voting tactically. For example, if you want a particular sitting TD to be eliminated, it’s never a bad idea to vote for his or her party running mate high up your list of preferences in the hope that he or she might be unseated by bad party management. You could also simply study the form and the polls and back the candidate you think most likely to take a seat from your least favourite candidate.
However, I do not recommend that approach, because this is not what the voting system is designed to do. On the ballot paper in Wicklow, you will not be asked whether you want Simon Harris to take a seat or not. You will simply be asked which of the candidates, including Simon Harris, you prefer. The whole idea of the system – proportional representation – is that everyone’s views are represented in some way by the collection of people elected to represent the constituency.
So there’s no effective way to formally vote against a candidate. All you can do is give preferences to literally everyone else, and hope that somewhere along the line you help someone else get elected instead.