Voting method

Great post/example.

It's up to the presiding officer to enforce the rules, so what he things is included in the "polling station" tends to be what matters.

To some extent it's going to depend on the kind of premises in which the polling station is located. But a great many of them are in primary schools, and it's a fairly well-established understanding that the polling station extends to the schoolyard gate. I think most presiding officers take that view.

Kathy Sheridan in the Irish Times wrestled with this problem, deciding to both vote up and down the ballot, then discovering she had two number 12's on it at the end. That wouldn't count as a spoilt vote though. So long as a vote has a valid #1 it's not spoiled. It would just become non-transferrable in the unlikely event it got to #12.

What she might have done was she went to the polling clerk and asked for a new ballot, making the original one technically spoiled, but not counted as such at the count. I'd guess most people don't realise you can do that.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/06/12/kathy-sheridan-i-ranked-among-that-much-derided-category-of-people-who-spoil-their-vote/

She could also have scribbled out one of the 12s and replaced it with a 13. Once there is a clear preference expressed, the returning officer will let it through.

It wouldn't be. I've been in the room when questionable ballots were adjudicated on.

I don't think you can state categorically that would be true always, because the decision is ultimately down to "the opinion of the returning officer". If he/she had a suspicion that the alteration was part of some vote identification scheme, they would be within their rights to exclude and ultimately nobody would succeed in challenging it. They would point to the fact that the voter can obtain a fresh ballot to correct an error like that.

Other way round. If there is a large number of ballots with corrections/changes of mind marked on them, then this not an device for identifying an individual ballot. What will bother a returning officer is some non-standard mark on the paper which is likely to be unique, or nearly so.

It's an offence under Electoral Act 1992 s. 137(4)(b) for a person to communicate at any time to another person any information obtained in a polling station as to the candidate for whom a voter in that station is about to vote or has voted.

So taking a ballot selfie may not be an offence, but showing to to anyone else is.

It refers to a person in a polling station. Exit polls are fine because they happen outside the station.

Telling your mates how you voted is fine, but showing them the photo you took in the polling station is not.

The section probably is mainly directed at polling officers, etc. But the wording refers to everyone in the polling station, which obviously includes voters. And the underlying policy is to protect the secrecy of the ballot, so there is no policy reason to read the section down so that a voter is taken not to be a person in a polling station.

Having said that, I'm not aware of anyone having been prosecuted for publishing a ballot selfie, and there have been a number of instances of ballot selfies being published.

Technology is enslaving humanity, I'm sure AI will wipe us out the first chance it gets! The ballot selfie will destroy modern democracy if not cracked down on, it's plays nicely with gombeen machine politics.

Yeah. The returning officer is generally asking himself two questions. First, is the voter's preference clear? Second, is this non-standard method of completing a ballot paper likely to be a device to facilitate identifying the ballot paper and linking it to a known voter? In most case the first question receives far more attention, because most questionable markings are clearly not attempts to identify the ballot paper — they involve corrections, erasures etc or they involve the writing of commonplace abuse against politicians on the paper (as well as completing it correctly).

Most returning officers take the view that commonplace abuse ("Crooks!" "Gangsters!" "Shower of bastards!") is not an identification mechanism, precisely because it's commonplace. More than one ballot will have things like this on written on it. But if you write something distinctive then, yeah, your ballot paper is at real risk of being ruled out. I know of one case, quite a few years ago, in which a paper with a (really quite witty) limerick on it, referrring to one candidate by name in very unflattering terms, was ruled out. At the same election a second equally distinctive insuit had been written on a separate sheet of paper and put into the ballot box, presumably inside a folded ballot paper. The very first stage of counting involves taking all the ballot papers out of the box, unfolding them and flattening them; at that stage the insult became detached from the ballot paper that it had been folded with, so no identification was possible, so no exclusion resulted.

Moral: if you want your vote to count, but also want your wit and wisdom to be heard by large numbers of people at the count centre, put it on a separate sheet of paper.

(Then there was the ballot paper smeared with what appeared from the smell to be human excrement. God know how the voter in question managed to get that into the box — there isn't that much privacy in the polling booth. That would probablhy have been ruled out, except that the question never arose — no preference was expressed.)

Sure, I've watched it myself and the returning officers do go out of their way to facilitate people's votes being counted, usually in opposition to other candidates trying to get them excluded.

We have a secure and fair voting system. People can become complacent about its qualities though and potential threats posed by technology and other developments. Eg the push for wider postal voting seems to naively assume that there won't be any resulting problem with coercion/vote buying.

I saw it mentioned on the 6.1 news again that taking selfies in the polling station is against the law ...