THE COUNT AFTER an election is a beautiful thing. All parties generally put aside their enmity and arrange a tally, where they view the votes as they are sorted by the official count people. Hundreds of counters are matched by tally people leaning over railings. Two counters unload a ballot box, which is numbered and accords to a particular geographic area on the electoral register.
The purpose of the first stage of a count is, officially, simply to ensure that the same number of ballots that the presiding officer counted in on polling day fall out of the box on count day.
The counters obligingly put each vote out in front of the tally people who are hanging on the other side of the railings so that they can gauge what votes come from what localities, and parties use this data to gauge where to put their political efforts over the coming years. The tally data may even influence, if you’re cynical of view, where school funding might be prioritised within a constituency and so on. If you’re cynical.
The tally people tot up votes from each box and this is then taken to tables in the count centres, where the parties have come together and arranged computers and power and broadband and printers and all the rest for a temporary command post. Sheets come in and Shinners sit next to Blueshirts and Soldiers of Destiny and everyone else; and they all cooperate to get the numbers.
The tally can actually be over relatively early in the day. I was in Citywest last Saturday, and the tally that started at 9am was over by lunchtime. We didn’t actually start to get the first official results until much later in the day, and then counting of the second and subsequent preferences went on for hours and – in some cases – days afterwards.
For political nerds that period of time from the opening of the boxes till lunchtime is heaven. Numbers are taking shape, campaigns are coming good or going sour; and knife edge battles for seats are getting intogear. After the tally and in the interminable waiting around until results of counts come through, every possible combination of numbers and outcomes are discussed.
Mostly, however, there is just waiting around. Count staff themselves, who are required in their greatest numbers at the start of a count, spend much of their time reading books and chatting amongst themselves as votes are laboriously separated and bundled and put into pigeon holes and broken out and counted again.
It is the nature of our system, with the single transferrable vote used only by us and Malta, which creates such long counts when they are done by hand.
One of the debacles of the government of Bertie Ahern that will likely live on in the memory longer than most was that of the introduction of e-voting machines. The machines weren’t well liked, the process of procurement was flawed and eventually they went into storage at much cost to the State before eventually being scrapped.
Many arguments are made against e-voting machines. Perhaps they’re unreliable or difficult to use, people say. Can they be hacked? Would you trust democracy to them?
It is time, I think, that we look again at e-voting. Firstly, our troubles with e-voting occurred ten years and two local elections ago at this stage. Have a think, if you’re old enough, to the type of phone or computer you were using ten years ago. It’s a lot different now.
Secondly, there is this notion that our current system is safer and more reliable because it is old and tried and tested. In fact, in most cases if you re-run a complete count you will never get precisely the same result twice. It is the nature of our system that by the time you get deep in fourth or fifth or eleventh counts, things have gotten so complex that count staff – who are often run into the wee hours by returning officers trying to get the job done – make mistakes.
In Dublin we had 350,000 votes cast. Over 6,000 of them were marked as spoiled and by the end, when Eamon Ryan was fewer votes behind Brian Hayes than it would take to elect a councillor in the local elections, over 46,000 votes had become ‘non-transferable’, with no further preference in effect. In those votes there are, I can almost assure you, votes that were incorrectly killed. In the transfers that did occur there were probably mistakes.
Some local counts came down to dozens of votes, if not fewer. This often happens. This is where we get major rechecks and recounts that last for days. Our current system is slow, expensive and actually relatively unreliable, if a precise count is required.
There are many examples of counts that have been drawn out and the results difficult to stand over in the end. During the Dublin West by-election in 2011, when Patrick Nulty was elected, there was a competition between Fianna Fail’s David McGuinness and the Socialist Party’s Ruth Coppinger (who has now won the second Dublin West by-election) to see who would take second place. Coppinger pulled ahead of McGuinness in one of the counts, and then the two came about even.
There were rechecks of the previous counts, where party officials watch the count staff as they recheck ballots and look for discrepancies. There are elements of opportunism in this. In the end, the returning officer did the sensible thing in the late hours and declared that, in fact, upon a check the two candidates had pulled exactly even with one another and so, in one sense, could both claim to have won second place (though Coppinger was technically third, as she had come behind McGuinness on the first count and so in goal-difference like thinking, he was ahead.)
I recall another count in Wicklow after the 2011 general election. This was for real, not just for bragging rights, and the count centre was filled with party supporters banging their feet and chanting – which might be a little intimidating for count staff who are also ringed by tally people in matching black bomber jackets, demanding checks of individual ballots. I do remember the place filling up with a lot of Gardai over the course of the night.
The point is, our system is slow, imprecise and I reckon open to a bit of party influence when races are particularly close.
E-voting, on the other hand, is quick and reliable where the technology is so. Results are instant and count staff don’t need to be paid €30 an hour each to sit around eating sandwiches and pizza on the taxpayer waiting for the laborious process to continue.
E-voting is now used in many first world countries. More to the point, it is also used in a lot of emerging economies. Brazil has been using e-voting since 2000. Estonia, a country with a GDP per person a third of our own, lets people vote via the internet using their national ID card. I’m not sure we’re ready for that, but is it not a bit embarrassing that the ‘digital hub’ of Ireland, global headquarters country to Google, Microsoft, Facebook et al, is behind on this?
Political parties worry that e-voting would rob them of their tally data. Fine, so design a system where we’re all put into virtual ‘boxes’ with geographical references the same as the current system. Instead of thousands of tallymen facing thousands of counters for four hours on a Saturday morning to deliver data to men with laptops, let the e-voting system fire out full tallies at around about one minute past ten on a Friday night after polls close.
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