Electoral systems discussion

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122928026#Comment_122928026

I keep finding massive holes in your terrible idea. You want to make it impossible for people to re-register at short notice; because it was pointed out that your previous version of the idea allowed incredibly easy disenfranchisement of anyone, and the one before that required incredible GDPR violations.

I am not forcing you to keep refining and defending your bad idea. You can stop any time.

rock22

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122924948#Comment_122924948

At least in Germany, the state know where everyone lives and it is a legal requirement to register where you live if you move address. That probably makes issuing postal votes more secure there.

We are very unlikely to implement a similar requirement here.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122924948#Comment_122924948

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26520836

Postal voting is open to fraud on an "industrial scale" and is "unviable" in its current form, a top judge has said.

Richard Mawrey QC, who tries cases of electoral fraud, told the BBC that people should not be able to apply for postal votes as a matter of course.

In January, the Electoral Commission said it was particularly concerned about 16 council areas in England.

In some of those areas, the BBC has heard allegations that political activists are pressuring families into voting for their candidate, or taking ballot papers away to fill them in, which is illegal.

BBC Radio 4's File on 4 spoke to a man in Derby who said his mother had her postal vote cast for her by activists who turned up at her house and pressurised her into letting them fill in her ballot paper.

He said: "Campaigners came to the house and they asked my mum to vote for them and actually my mum, not being able to read English, she didn't know where to put the cross, so one of the people put the cross in the box for her and said, 'There you go now you can just sign it and we will take it off you.'

Why open our very reputable electoral system (the poor state of the register aside) up to this for the sake of lazy so-and-sos who can't be bothered to get to the polling station?

dulpit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122929735#Comment_122929735

No postal voting so, but definitely more flexibility is needed for people who aren't around on the day of voting (e.g. early voting).

Hotblack Desiato

Maybe, but it seems like quite a lot of effort to facilitate a very small number of people.

If we had an accurate register then we'd have accurate turnout figures, they're greatly below what they should be due to duplication.

boardise

I noticed that there seemed to be surprisingly big disparities in the proportionality of representation between some constituencies . I give a few examples :-

5 seaters -Galway W -1 seat per 20,600 of electorate -Donegal - 1 seat per 26,000 of electorate.

3 seaters - Dublin Finglas West -1 seat per 17,150 of electorate Cork SW -1 seat per 24,700 of electorate

While quotas depend on turnout there happened to be large differences in quotas far bigger than the relatively small differences in turnout.

e.g.Dub Finglas W -Quota =7530 Cork SW quota = 11,800

Dub Central ( 4 seats) Quota = 6550 Clare ( 4 seats) Quota = 12,180

( En passant …other figures caught my eye = A candidate in Dub Central was elected on just 2465 1st preferences !!

Another in Dub Bay N was elected on 5.5 % 1 st preferences.)

How are the disparities in seat proportionality allowed to persist -I thought the whole idea was to equalise the proportion and there was a constituency review and revamp carried out quite recently .

Is there not something at least anomalous in the wide tolerances that arise in quotas -in the exx above the differences are of the order of 57% and 85%.

Anyone else notice this ? I thought there might have been some comments on the media about the issue but if there were I missed them.

dulpit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122948479#Comment_122948479

The constituion says that there must be 1 TD for every 20,000 - 30,000 citizens. So there's a wide enough scale there. This number of citizens is based on the census, and is not based on the number of electors. It would be interesting to compare the number of electors against both the number of registered voters but also the citizen count of the area. Areas with very large population of young people will have proportionally lower number of voters than older areas too.

This clause of the constitution is going to need to be reviewed though, with the population growing we're going to end up needing more and more TDs.

Hotblack Desiato

It's not determined by citizens though but by population.

2° The number of members shall from time to time be fixed by law, but the total number of members of Dáil Éireann shall not be fixed at less than one member for each thirty thousand of the population, or at more than one member for each twenty thousand of the population.

Non-citizens and under-18s are counted when determining the number of seats, but (with the sole exception of UK citizens) they're not part of the electorate so not counted in the turnout

A constituency with a large number of people not entitled to vote will have fewer voters per TD. If it's also an area with traditionally poor turnout, as many Dublin constituencies are, then it'll have even fewer voters per TD.

A candidate in Dub Central was elected on just 2465 1st preferences !!

Another in Dub Bay N was elected on 5.5 % 1st preferences.

Expecting seats to be allocated on the basis of first preferences is totally missing the point of PR. The candidate which most people find agreeable enough for a preference has a better chance than a 'marmite' candidate who can get a certain amount of no.1s but is despised by everyone else

Brussels Sprout

Yes it's why the electorate in Dublin Central is always so much smaller than other 4-seaters in the country. There's a massive population of non-Irish/UK citizens living in dublin city centre. They're not eligible to vote in general elections but they are counted for the purposes of determining the number of required seats in the constituency.

The net result is that Dublin Central has by far the lowest electorate of any of the 4-seaters (63k). Compare that to another 4-seater, Waterford (97k). It's even lower than some 3-seaters, e.g. Limerick County (75k).

If you want to boil it down to a simple rule of thumb, "The higher the ratio of Irish/UK adult citizens to the total population living in a constituency, the higher the quota will typically be".

Since people who aren't citizens of either Ireland or the UK disproportionately live in urban areas quotas tend to be lower in those.

Some more examples:

Urban Quotas

• Dublin South-Central - 7.5k
• Limerick City - 8.4k
• Dublin Mid-West - 7.9k

Rural Quotas

• Mayo - 11.8k
• Donegal - 12.7k
• Clare - 12.2k

dulpit

Maybe permanent residents should get a vote too? Would maybe even those ratios out a bit… Plus permanent residents are directly affected by the Dáil so why shouldn't they get a vote?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122949362#Comment_122949362

Was proposed in the early days of the last FF-Green Government; never went anywhere. Was going to come with a concept of "permanent residency" even for people allowed live here by EU rights, and a language test.

It is constitutional - rather than add "and the Brits" in the 80s, the amendment changed it to "whoever the Oireachtas allows".

Still need citizenship to vote in a referendum or for the President, both of those are explicit in the constitution.

dulpit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122949404#Comment_122949404

I don't mind citizenship for the referendum and Presidency, but I'd like it to be expanded to residents. Other countries who restrict foreigners to voting in just local elections at least have a decent amount of power for the local government which we don't.

Hotblack Desiato

We offer votes here to UK citizens because the UK offers votes there to Irish citizens.

If any EU country wishes to do similar I'm sure we'd reciprocate.

Non-EU residents here have a strong incentive to seek citizenship anyway.

Hotblack Desiato

The net result is that Dublin Central has by far the lowest electorate of any of the 4-seaters (63k). Compare that to another 4-seater, Waterford (97k).

Yet you don't have to spend long on the Waterford forum to see someone complaining that they're "overrun with immigrants" 🙄

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122949990#Comment_122949990

Checking the ever unreliable wikipedia; it seems that Portugal does reciprocal deals with anyone who wants, but basically nobody else does; so there could be a deal done there - and there is a substantial Portuguese passport holding population in Ireland and indeed in Dublin Central.

Jakey Rolling

….

McGiver

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122914737#Comment_122914737

It was and it has a simple solution - break Dublin up to multiple constituencies and leave everything else as is. Leitrim - too bad.

dulpit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122971698#Comment_122971698

Or you could break other big counties up too. Cork you could split into say 5 constituencies? And then if some counties are too small, join them with others. Sligo and Leitrim are both small, join them?

You know, it's almost like they thought of this already...

McGiver

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122971847#Comment_122971847

There's no need to split anything outside of Dublin.
How it would look like. Dublin would have to be obviously broken.
Counties with less than 100k population are problematic on their own. In fact, they should be merged regardless.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122971903#Comment_122971903

I'm not against having constituencies larger than 5 seats but a 19 seat constituency (Cork) would probably end up having 70+ candidates on the ballot. That would be problematic for all sorts of reasons

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122973765#Comment_122973765

19 seat 1925 Seanad election had 76 candidates.

I could see three figures these days.

McGiver

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122973765#Comment_122973765

So where do you see the upper limit of seats per constituency? 7, 10, 12, 15?

Obviously, 3-5 seats are bad, on the other end of the spectrum. Completely defies the PR in the PR-STV.

jlang

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122973781#Comment_122973781

Very interesting. From the article - nobody was elected until the 45th count and the final 65th count wasn't completed until over a month after the election with only 9 having reached the quota before that stage.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122976752#Comment_122976752

Personally I'd like to see constituencies between 4-7 seats.

jlang

I'd agree on 4-7 seats, and here's my suggestion based off the last review. The main benefit is being able to use 6 seaters preventing the need to split many counties into two 3s. (6/7 seaters will help for the same reason in Dublin too)

Limerick and Meath are the only natural 7 seaters and Waterford and Clare are 4s, but both slightly underrepresented at 4. 4s would also be needed in the split for Kildare (8) and Galway (9) - and probably appropriate for West Cork.

I'd pair up the smaller counties as follow : Longford/Westmeath (5), Carlow/Kilkenny (6), Cavan/Monaghan (5), Laois/Offaly (6), Sligo/Leitrim/Roscommon (6). This follows previously used pairings and the maths work out well at 174.

I looked at higher numbers than 174, but going for more doesn't solve any problems except trying to predict for future growth. Even at substantially higher numbers, Sligo/Leitrim/Roscommon together still only allow for a single 6 seater as the 21st seat for Connacht would be a 10th seat for Galway. Going cross-province to add Donegal or Longford into that mix doesn't really help.

With the same number of seats as the recent election, standalone counties have the same number of seats as now, so the existing fine-tuning solutions would have to be similar and are mostly equally unavoidable. There would still be a need to transfer 10000 votes or so across the Wexford/Wicklow border to split two natural 5.5's into a 5 and a 6, but no longer a need to make a third small constituency. Similarly, Louth and Meath together make 12, but do it better if the area near Drogheda votes in Louth.

Beyond that, I'd start off suggesting no additional county breaches, but some of the current ones would likely have to be retained to keep the per seat numbers in range. e.g. Small areas of Waterford and/or Clare could be transferred into Tipp. I'd leave Mayo slightly over-represented as a 5 seater.

(Apologies if this should be in a different thread specific to the Irish situation)

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122976752#Comment_122976752

If you have too many seats then the last ones aren't as representative unless people vote all the way down the sheet and even then…

Three seaters are harder for smaller parties but balanced out by five seaters which benefit them.

As an MEP Farraige stood in a ten seater.

dulpit

We probably don't want 10 or 12 seat constituencies, but we need to knock 3 seaters on the head. 6 and 7 seaters seem sensible too.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122978710#Comment_122978710

Farage stood for MEP in a list system, not STV. Very different.

markodaly

One drawback in our system, is that there is rarely a definitive outcome and forming a government is often tedious, drawn-out with a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123043459#Comment_123043459

Why is that a drawback? Serious question.

You can have a government that is formed almost immediately, and with great clarity, but that is opposed by most voters and implements a mandate that most voters have rejected. Or you can have a government that has to negotiates support from the reprsentatives of a majority of voters, make compromises, build consensus.

I don't see why speed and certainty are virtues — do they really matter that much? — but, if they are, they come a long way behind a solid democratic mandate. Are there systems that offer both?