The Local and EU elections: A guide to using your vote

In recent weeks more than a dozen readers have either commented or emailed in asking for a guide on how the voter should use their vote during the upcoming local and European elections.

Ireland uses an electoral system called “proportional representation; single transferable vote”. The first part of this name describes the objective of the system: That the seats in elected bodies like the Dáil, County Councils, and the European Parliament should be allocated roughly proportionally: In other words, if a party wins exactly 20% of the vote it should win almost exactly 20% of the seats, and so on.

The second part of the name describes the method used to achieve this aim: The single transferable vote. This is the ballot that you will be filling in for the local and European elections in early June.

The name is fairly self explanatory: You have one vote, but that vote may be transferred according to your preferences.

On the ballot paper, you will be asked to rank the candidates from top to bottom in order of your preference. If there are 15 candidates, then a fully filled out ballot paper will rank the candidates from one to fifteen. There is no obligation, however, to vote the whole way down. From years of observing counts, I can tell you that by far the most common vote is one where the voter has selected three preferences and left all the other boxes blank. Others will only vote for one candidate, and some will vote the whole way down. Once you have clearly indicated a single first preference, your vote is valid and will be counted.

However, only voting for one candidate, while perfectly legal, is also objectively a poor decision which makes your own voice count for less. You can vote for as many candidates as you like, and here are a few reasons why you should do so:

• Your number one vote only really matters on the first count

How your vote is counted is as follows: On the first count, the first preference votes are counted. On every subsequent count, the focus is on counting lower preferences.

How this works is thus: The objective in a PRSTV election for each candidate is to reach the quota – the total number of votes required to take a seat. This is worked out by the following formula: Total number of valid votes/(total number of seats +1), plus one.

Or, in simple terms: In a constituency where there are four seats, and fifty thousand valid votes cast, the quota would be 10,001. Total number of votes (50k) divided by total number of seats plus one (5) with one vote added on.

If a candidate gets more than that number of votes, he or she is deemed elected. The vast majority of candidates who get elected in Ireland do not get elected on the first count. Indeed, that is how the system is designed.

In all subsequent counts after the first count, it is lower preference votes that matter. This is because on each count, at least one candidate is eliminated. This is either because they have reached the quota and been “deemed elected”, or more usually because they are the lowest ranking candidate, and have been eliminated from contention. When the lowest ranked candidates are eliminated, their votes (and only their votes) are counted, with their votes then being re-assigned to the next highest preference recorded on the ballots for a candidate who remains in contention.

• Every preference on your ballot paper is potentially as strong as a number one vote

Let us imagine that you cast your ballot for a candidate who was eliminated on the first count. Your second preference vote is then counted, and your vote goes into the pile of votes belonging to that candidate. At that stage, there is no difference between your vote, which was a second preference, and the vote of somebody else who cast a first preference. They count exactly the same.

In fact,  this can be true of any preference on your ballot paper: Imagine your first preference candidate was eliminated very late on in the count, and that your second, third, fourth, and fifth preference candidates had all been eliminated first. At that stage, your sixth preference, if that candidate is still in the race, will count just as much as your first preference. If a candidate is elected on the tenth count, it’s a virtual guarantee that that candidate is getting sixth and ninth preference votes in their pile, each one counting as much as a number one. In one election count, in Cavan-Monaghan in 2011, this correspondent saw a eighth preference vote help elect Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys over Sinn Fein’s Kathryn Reilly. Deputy Humphreys is now in the cabinet. Eighth preferences matter.

When counting your vote, it will always be assigned to the highest ranked candidate on your ballot paper who is still in the election. And it will always count the exact same as if that ranking – whether it be number 4 or number 11 – was a number one vote.

• Your ranking of candidates really matters

Some people will say, on places like facebook, that a voter should only vote for candidates they want to see elected, because otherwise they could see their vote ending up in the pile of somebody they ranked eighth or ninth and really didn’t want to see elected at all. This is true, but it misses the point entirely.

If you fill out your ballot paper in full, the only candidate who can never receive your vote is the candidate you rank last. Somebody will always be ahead of them. This is an important power that the voter has that too few voters understand: If your vote is helping to elect somebody, it is only doing so because you ranked somebody else below them, or left other boxes blank.

Let us imagine here a voter who really does not want to see a particular party winning seats. In that scenario, the best way to use your vote is to fill the ballot out in full and leave that party’s candidates to the very end. This ensures that your vote will always be available to somebody else, ahead of that party’s candidates.

This might not matter if you genuinely have no preference between, say, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. But many, many, election counts in many many seats will come down in the end to a choice between those two parties for the last seat – or between Fine Gael and Labour, or Aontú and the Soc Dems. The question you have to ask as a voter is whether you want a say in that choice.

If you do want a say in it, the best thing to do is to fill your ballot out in full. Then, your vote will always be available to the highest ranked remaining candidate – and if the final seat comes down to, for argument’s sake, the Fianna Fáiler you ranked 9^th and the Independent you ranked 7^th, then your vote will go to the Independent and it will count just as much as your number one did.

• People you do not agree with will be elected, understand that when voting

This is an essential thing to understand about our electoral system, and it follows directly on from the last point. Because we use a proportional system, it is a matter of guarantee for every voter that candidates they do not agree with will be elected. In a five seat constituency, for example, four of the five candidates elected will by definition be candidates you did not vote number one for. It is entirely possible that none of them will be somebody you voted number one for.

If you are only voting 1, or only voting 1,2,3, in a five-seat constituency, then at the very minimum you are forfeiting your say over who gets the remaining two or four seats in the constituency. This is why voting as far down your ballot paper as you can makes sense. At the VERY minimum, you should be voting for as many candidates as there are seats to be filled.

Never use your number vote “tactically”

Our electoral system rewards honesty on behalf of the voter, and you should never over-complicate your vote.

What I mean by this is that you should never not vote for somebody because you think they have no chance of being elected, or because you think they are definitely going to be elected without your vote.

Let’s say you really like a no-hoper who people say will be lucky to get a dozen votes: It is not a “waste” of a vote to vote number one for them. If “people” are right, and they do only get a dozen votes, then your vote will transfer to the next candidate on your ballot ranking anyway, and count just as much as a number one.

This is particularly true for small parties: In Ireland, political funding is tied to the percentage of the vote that a party receives, not the number of candidates it gets elected. You receive state funding if you achieve 2% of the first preference vote nationwide in a General Election.

Therefore, your vote is about more than just electing candidates. Voting number one for a small party, even if that party wins no seats, could be the difference between that party surviving and that party going bankrupt.

To make our system work for you, as a voter, the best thing to do is to vote your conscience, rank as many preferences down the ballot paper as you can stomach, and let the chips fall where they may.

If readers have any more questions about the voting system, or how to use it, then feel free to drop an email into news@gript.ie, and we’ll endeavour to answer them before polling day.