When you visit the polling station today, most of you will be handed two separate ballots for two separate elections. The exception is that if you happen to live in Limerick, you will be handed three ballots for three separate elections, because Limerick is voting to elect a directly-elected mayor of the city for the first time.
These ballots should be filled out separately. I say this because at every local and European election, there are some proportion of voters who do not understand this – they vote 1, 2, 3 on the local election ballot, and then continue and start their EU election ballot with “4, 5, 6”. Do not do this: They are separate elections, and you need to rank at least a first preference on each ballot.
Your votes will then be placed – together – into one ballot box. At this stage, your job as a voter is over, and the job of the count staff will begin.
The first thing to note is that the polling officers at your polling booth have a job to do: They will mark your name off the register and, at the end of the day, they will note how many people voted. The ballot box will then be sealed, and taken overnight by the Gardai to the place where the votes are to be counted. There will be more local election votes cast than EU election votes cast, because several thousand voters will be eligible to vote in local elections, but not EU elections (for example: Ukrainians or people from Africa who have migrated here).
On Saturday morning, the boxes will be opened by count staff at 9am sharp, and the votes will be spilled out onto tables in full public view. The first job of the count staff will be to separate the votes into local election votes, and European election votes. This will be the first time that there might be any indication of the result, as experienced watchers (tallymen) will be able to see where the number one votes are going in both local and EU elections.
However, we should not expect definitive data: Most tallymen will be representing local election candidates, and much more focused on that election than on the EU election. In addition, with such large EU constituencies, individual boxes will tell you very little. If you see a box from Navan for example where Peadar Toibin is topping the poll, remember that Navan is his home town – topping the poll there doesn’t mean he is necessarily getting elected.
Once the votes are sorted out into their separate elections, the EU votes will be stored, and we will not see them again on Saturday. The EU election counts will not begin, properly, until Sunday morning.
The local election count works as follows: Once the boxes have been opened and the votes sorted – this should take until 11am or so – the count staff will then begin to sort the votes into piles of first preferences for each candidate, and a separate pile for spoiled votes. This is the longest stage of the count, and depending on the size of the area and the number of candidates, could take several hours.
Once that sorting has been completed – usually slightly before or sometime after lunch – a first count proper can begin. The votes for each candidate are counted by hand, and usually bundled into packages of (usually) fifty votes each. Where a bundle does not contain 50 votes, a sticker will be put on it indicating how many votes are in the bundle. The bundles are then piled up, and counted.
This is usually the stage at which mistakes can be made: Sometimes a bundle is wrongly allocated to a different candidate, or more often a counter simply miscounts 49 votes as 50, or something of that nature. This is why recounts usually produce a change of a few dozen votes, or sometimes a few hundred – but by and large the system tends to work very well.
Once the first count has been completed, the returning officer will add up all the votes cast to work out a final turnout figure, and calculate the quota. The quota is the total valid poll (all votes minus spoiled votes) divided by the number of seats + 1 (so in a five seater, this is the total valid poll, divided by six) with then one vote added on.
The reason for this is that the quota is the figure which – were all elected candidates to achieve it – would rank them ahead of anyone else. To explain this, imagine there are four seats. The quota would then be 20% of the vote plus one vote (100% divided by (4+1) plus one). If four candidates achieved 20% of the vote plus one vote, then the maximum left for somebody else would be 19.9999% of the vote, meaning that they could not overtake someone on the quota.
In some very small local election areas, we might expect a first count by maybe 2pm – but in many we should expect one by 4-5pm. After this point, subsequent counts will continue until all seats have been filled. The vast majority of local election areas should be finished counting by Saturday night.
The European Elections will take much longer, for several reasons.
First, the sheer scale of the votes to be counted. Second, the number of candidates will mean that the sorting process will take much, much longer than it will in a local election area. Third, it will take many more counts to fill all the seats because of the large number of candidates.
Therefore, on Sunday, even though the count will begin at 9am, we should not expect a full first count figure until late in the evening, and probably not a second count in any of the constituencies (except perhaps Dublin) until Monday.
By the time we get a first count, we will have an idea of some of the results: The first two or three seats in most elections can usually be safely predicted by a first count. However, in a constituency with 20 or more candidates, the final seats may not be decided until very late on in the count – which might take until Wednesday or later in Midlands North West and Ireland South.
By lunchtime tomorrow, then, we will probably have some idea of trends. If a candidate is performing unexpectedly strongly, for example, we may have some hint of that – if multiple reports are coming in of, say, Derek Blighe topping the poll in boxes in Ireland South, that might tell us something, or if word is coming through that Hazel Chu’s vote is well down in Dublin, that might bode poorly for Ciaran Cuffe. But by and large, in terms of the EU elections, Saturday will be a day of rumour, not fact.
In conclusion, then, buckle in and be prepared to wait. It is usually possible to “call” a referendum early on count day because referendums are binary options – it’s either Yes or No. In an election like this, it may take days for the full results to be known.