How It Works

What is this site?

Boards.ie has over 190,000 active members in Ireland. Could we predict the outcome of the General Election?

We have created this site to help map how our members intend to vote and to create discussion in our General Election forum.

How will this information be used?

Any information available on this website is for public use. We are not affiliated with any political party.

Information collected in the Boards.ie 2011 General Election Poll will be used only on an anonymous aggregate basis. No individual voting preferences will be used for any purpose, and your voting preferences will not be displayed anywhere on site. No Boards.ie moderators have access to this information. You can read our Privacy Statement here.

How do you determine the quota in each constituency?

The quota in each constituency is calculated in the same way as it will be in the actual election, using the Droop quota method. This system looks at the number of votes cast and the number of seats available in order to determine how many votes are required for a candidate to be deemed elected. You can read more about the Droop quota here.

How do you predict who will be elected?

Candidates are elected to Dáil Éireann using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system of Proportional Representation (PR). Read how this works here. We are using the same system to predict who will win each seat in each constituency. Our system refreshes every 15 minutes, predicting the winners of each seat.

How accurate are your results?

This is the first time that we've done a Boards.ie General Election Poll so it's difficult to say how accurate our predictions will be. Assuming that we have a sufficiently large sample in each constituency, and assuming that Boards.ie members are representative of the population, our results should be accurate.

For comparison purposes, a typical political poll has a margin of error of +/- 3%. We have a wide user base in each Irish county, so it'll be interesting to see if it works.

Can I change my constituency, or change my voting preferences, after I have voted?

Yes, you can change your constituency and you can change your voting preferences within your chosen constituency. Each Boards.ie member has only one vote however, so your most recent vote is the only one which affects the overall result.

We will track your voting history on this site in order to analyse trends. Read more here.

Can your system be gamed?

In theory yes, the system could be gamed. For example:

• people could register numerous Boards.ie accounts and vote repeatedly
• people could vote who aren't actually registered to vote in the actual election
• people who are not resident in the state, or are not eligible to vote, could vote

We'll do our best to monitor the site, identify offenders and prevent them from gaming the system.

Who has created this site?

This was created in-house by our technical team with candidate data imported from TheJournal.ie. It's a work in progress

How can I contact you?

To let us know about any errors, omissions or what you think, you can contribute to this thread in our General Election forum at http://www.boards.ie/ge11 or contact us at hello@boards.ie

Boards.ie Ltd is based at Latin Hall, Golden Lane, Dublin 8.