Jim Gavin’s posters are still up.
This weekend alone, I saw them in Limerick and Dublin. Jim Gavin has, of course, withdrawn from the election, yet his posters are still up.
There is nothing illegal or lawless about this. Legally and lawfully, Jim Gavin remains a candidate in the Presidential election, and you may vote for him to be your next President if you wish. He hasn’t so much “withdrawn from the election” as he has “suspended his campaign”.
Here’s a fun fact: If Jim Gavin somehow were to sneak his way to 12.5% of the vote on the first count next week, he would be considered to have “saved his expenses”. That would mean that his campaign would be entitled to apply to the Department of Finance, via the Standards in Public Office Commission, for a refund of up to €250,000 of his election expenses.
The rule is the same in all elections: Getting one quarter of the way to the quota by the time you are eliminated means you are entitled to a generous refund of what you spent on the campaign by the taxpayer. In a Presidential election, the quota is 50%, meaning that 12.5% is the magic number for Fianna Fáil.
There is no doubt that the party has expended considerable sums: Election posters average around eleven euro a pop – maybe €15 if the party is paying a contractor to put them up and take them down again. 10,000 posters alone would have set the party back €150,000 of donor’s money.
I say donor’s money because the laws around election funding mean that Fianna Fáil is not allowed to spend any of the money it gets from the taxpayer on election campaigns. Money for posters must be raised via the annual draw, the annual dinner, and membership fees.
But of course, when you are a party the size of FF, you can almost always be certain that your candidate will do well enough to get a big chunk of the money back.
Fianna Fáil is suddenly facing a crisis, therefore: It has already expended almost all of the money on a Presidential campaign, from posters to leaflets to presumably having booked a lot of local newspaper advertising and so on, and now finds itself without a candidate. Over the weekend, a report of €500,000 in spending was mentioned, which seems ridiculously high. But we can be relatively certain that the party has already shelled out at least the €200k it would have gotten back if Gavin had made the 12.5%.
But speaking to a couple of (non elected) Fianna Fáilers over the weekend, it certainly seems as if the party is hoping that Gavin might still get there. The Independent reported, for example, that many FF TDs still intend to give their ex-candidate (zombie candidate?) a number one preference, and my hunch from speaking to some footsoldiers is that they intend to do the same and are quietly encouraging a kind of “vote Gavin as a protest” movement in the hope that recalcitrant voters might push their man above the expenses threshold.
Indeed, when Gavin withdrew, this writer sent a tweet which was entirely factual, pointing out that one way to get an entirely new Presidential election would be for the voters to actually elect Jim Gavin, on the pretty safe assumption that he would refuse to take up the job. This would necessitate a new election.
But of course, that is not going to happen – it was an idle thought. Yet I am told that some in FF are hoping that this idea takes root amongst dissatisfied voters in a bid to maximise Gavin’s first preference vote, to the financial advantage of their own party.
Leaving the posters up, I think, is a sign that this effort is being encouraged quietly by Fianna Fáil headquarters. Either that, or it is a simple matter of them having paid somebody to put the poster up on X date and take them down on Y date, and that contract stands.
Of course, all of this exposes the ludicrousness of the situation: The electoral acts simply do not envisage a situation where a Presidential candidate “withdraws” during the campaign proper, and there was no legal mechanism to remove Gavin from the ballot. Which poses another question: Suppose Heather Humphreys and Catherine Connolly were to suffer similar massive scandals before the week was out, and both took the same course Gavin did: Would the state still be compelled to hold an election between three people all of whom had disavowed the job?
The simple answer to that, under the electoral laws as they are currently written, is “yes”: The state would have to hold a zombie election with zombie candidates. Given how narrow the field in this contest is, and given the great lengths politicians went to keep it that way, this is an area of electoral law we should probably look at reforming.
As for Gavin himself, every vote he gets will get him no closer to the Presidency, but gets Fianna Fáil closer to 12.5% and a big cheque. The weekend opinion poll put Gavin’s residual support at 12%.
Watch this space.
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