2026 Galway West By Election

If your 1st pref will be eliminated early, and your second pref will very likely be in the race until the last three candidates, then there is no need to express prefs all the way down the ballot paper.

Say you vote:

1. PBP / Garrity / Aontú, etc.
2. Kyne / Thomas

then your vote will transfer once, at the elimination, and then stay in the Kyne or Thomas pile until the end.

In that scenario, if you actually held a specific preference for Ogbu over Thomas, you will waste your preference. This is why you need to keep going until you actually no longer care / can no longer stand anyone.

However, I believe the poster you're quoting is quite sure that Thomas and Kyne are going to be 1 and 2 (one way or the other) all the way to the end, despite the polls suggesting that is quite impossible. More than a few people here seem to think that though!

So there are three candidates left.

The original Garrity vote is now in the Kyne pile.

Kyne is eliminated, that means all of Kyne's votes (including the specific vote) can move again, to another pile.

Yes, I see your point, fair enough.

If this was a regular election, and Kyne was elected, not eliminated, only the top slice of votes would transfer as part of his surplus, so the vote would be dead then.

You are completely wrong about this. There is a scheme that allows for deferral of LPT until someone dies or sells the house.

https://www.revenue.ie/en/property/local-property-tax/deferral-of-payment/index.aspx

Has anyone in Galway ever ran a Vote #2 campaign? Try survive the first few rounds and live on transfers. There are so many candidates in this race that don't have a realistic hope, someone should mix up the strategy.

Doomed to failure - most of your #2s will be from higher placed candidates and you'll be gone on your own small FPV well before that.

Outside of Galway West I've seen a candidate who would have topped the poll if #2s counted for that - extremely popular, for transfers. This is based on seeing actual ballot papers in tallying/counting/transferring etc. Far and away the highest recipient of #2s from multiple different candidates #1s

Didn't get in despite having thousands of her own FPV, because most of her #2s were from candidates who got elected on later counts and hence never got used.

Good point.

I've seen Vote #2 campaigns elsewhere but that was for multi seat elections with very carefully coordinated campaigning between a group of candidates in different regions across the electoral area. Those candidates would have had #1 campaigns in other areas.

I've said it earlier in the thread but I really cannot see Kyne winning, even with all of the polls he is topping.

His performance in the last two elections, in my mind, coupled with some of the localised and national bad government sentiment make it difficult for him.

Time will tell I suppose.

No. Guess some group are trying to skew the online poll. SF used to do same

Mark Lohan's campaign van drove past my house about 2 hours ago blaring out what I think was 'Don't Stop' by Fleetwood Mac.

Called to my door at 630pm as I was heading out. Must have been 12-15 of them out knocking on doors.