h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I voted yeserday. Ireland's voting system is one of the fairest in the world, second only to that of Northern Ireland in my opinion.

In my constituency, we had 9 candidates on the ballot paper and only 3 seats to be filled.

Today is the count. They've been counting since first thing this morning. It's now nearly 6pm and they should have the result of the 4th count soon. 3 candidates have been eliminated and one elected. Two or three counts should settle it so we should know the result by about 9pm. And a similar drama is going on in every other consituency.

Will the government fall? Almost definitely. Who'll replace them? It's anybody's guess.

to you all with the election. (I bet you do better than we will.)

The title of this journal entry made me ask myself, 'Dracula or Sesame Street?'

Yes I had thought of .

The results of the 4th count are in. The Labour guy has been eliminated. It will take 2 more counts. I predict either two FGs or one FG and one Green to fill the remaining two seats. FG are the existing government. I'd love the Green to get in - we need to worry about the fact that we're destroying the world we were lucky enough to be born on.

Good luck to the Greens, then. Have you seen the Norwegian tv series 'Okkupert'? It's a dystopian story about what might happen if Norway went for the Green Party. They get occupied by Russia.

Fifth count completed.

Fianna Fail candidate eliminated. Her votes will now be redistributed in the final count. The Greens are behind, but it's still all in the balance.

So the final count is in. Alan Shatter, the Minister for Justice in the previous government, has lost his seat.

The Green Party woman got in!

Good stuff, Gnomon!

I agree about the voting system being very good.

Sometimes people complain about the time it takes for the count to happen. Sometimes if we have an election on a Thursday in the north, some of the seats aren't declared until the start of the following week. Especially in a couple of places where there are recounts, because it sometimes boils down to a difference of less than ten votes.

But to be honest, I don't have a problem with the count taking three or four days. If you're electing an assembly that is going to be in place for four or five years, three or four days is a price worth paying to make it fair and transparent.

We need an Entry on Proportional Representation.

I heard once that PR was invented by an English clergyman, but I can't find this mentioned in the wiki article. I heard that he proposed that the whole country should be one constituency and that everyone should vote for whoever they wanted from the list of candidates, giving transferable second preferences to be counted in the event of their first candidate either (a) being elected with a surplus of votes, or (b) being eliminated with no hope of gaining the quota.

The quota is that number of votes that only the required number of candidates can reach; if there are 99 seats in Parliament and a million valid votes are cast, the quota is ten thousand and one, since 100 candidates could (in an unlikely event) get ten thousand votes each, but not 10,001.

Each voter can at their discretion give a third, fourth and fifth preference and so on, listing all the candidates in order of preference if they want to. As quotas are met and losers eliminated, votes are recounted until enough candidates are elected to fill the seats available.

This is more or less the Irish system, though the whole-country approach is abandoned in favour of three-, four-, and five-seat constituencies. It is a much better system for giving fair representation to minorities than the first-past-the-post system used in Britain.

The whole-country system would be fairer, and technology could now deal with the paperwork quickly enough. Electronic voting machines are a very bad idea, as a paper trail is required for settling disputes, but vote-counting machines could produce reliable results that all interested parties could verify for themselves.

I'm still waiting for any candidate I've ever voted for to be elected into office. Sometimes I wonder what the point is.

In Ireland, if there are 3 seats in the constituency, then all the votes will be distributed between the top four candidates, using second, third, fourth etc preferences. The fourth candidate will be eliminated. So at most one quarter of the voters will not get a candidate of their choice, and usually a good deal less.

In my constituency, for example, 41,000 people voted; 29,000 of those votes were used to elect the three winning candidates. Of the remaining 12,000, 8,000 were for the candidate who came 4th (whose votes were not redistributed), and the other 4,000 were ones where people hadn't provided a useful alternative preference.

So most of the votes get used.

It sounds very complicated, but all the voter has to do is vote 1 for their first preference, 2 for their next and so on. Simple.

They're still counting in some places. In Cork East the count took 22 hours. They don't seem to break for sleep.

I was put in mind of my previous moniker, Count Zero.

The count appears to be finished. Now they have to figure out how to form that group of 150 or so chosen ones into a working government.

Yes, that's usually the hard part.

I wonder if there's a war room somewhere, where they're moving small models of the elected representatives around a plan of the parliament chamber, using long rakes.

A few recounts have been requested.

That would be cool.

The war room, not the recounts.