Electoral Reform committee  We had an opinion poll just last week that showed that the support for independents had really gone down a lot since the election, so the public as a whole doesn't seem to like it a great deal, but these are early days and things may change.

Electoral Reform committee  When it comes to, say, manifesto promises, if you have a small left-wing party that people expect to get about 10% of the votes, their manifesto might say that if they form the government, they'll do all these things, but the voters know they're not going to form a government on

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. In fact, some independents are people who used to be in parties. Maybe they fell out of the party or the party threw them out or they tried to get picked as a party candidate and weren't successful, so instead of that they stood as an independent. “Independent” is a kind of

Electoral Reform committee  Well, it is a fact that to be elected in Ireland it does help if you have a name early in the alphabet. It's a striking phenomenon that academics have noticed. If your name begins with “A”, “B”, “C”, or “D”, that helps you. If it begins with “Z“, actually, that's okay too. If it

Electoral Reform committee  The Supreme Court, I think, looked into this and said it wasn't for them to look into the mind of the voter. You could certainly randomize it, but that might make it even more difficult for voters to find the candidates they were looking for.

Electoral Reform committee  It's perfectly likely that the first-place candidate might have been, for example, a Liberal candidate, the second one a Labour candidate, and then a Green candidate in third place, so when the Green candidate was eliminated, their preferences would have taken the Labour candidat

Electoral Reform committee  That's right.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, but the logic would be that the person who eventually wins, the Labour candidate who was second, actually was more popular among the voters as a whole, even though he or she didn't have as many first-preference votes.

Electoral Reform committee  The alternative vote is not a kind of PR and the outcomes it produces are not that different from first past the post, really, so in some ways I think it would be a huge amount of effort to achieve very little if Canada had a really strong deliberative process and then simply mov

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I think so, because the results of Australian elections tend to be just as disproportional as elections in Britain or Canada, for example. You don't get very close proportionality, and in particular the smaller parties really lose out systematically.

Electoral Reform committee  People just don't have strong feelings about many of the candidates. The maximum number of candidates for a constituency at the last election was, I think, 24; that's the longest ballot paper. There was another with only five candidates chasing for three seats. Generally speaki

Electoral Reform committee  When you sit down to fill in these ballots, it's usually easy enough to fill in the first few and it's easy enough to do the ones at the bottom. You know who you really don't like, so if there are 24, you might know who you want to rank 20 to 24 and who you want to rank one to fo

Electoral Reform committee  That's entirely up to the parties. The parties run as many candidates as they want, and independents can stand as well.

Electoral Reform committee  There's a thorough candidate selection process within each party.

Electoral Reform committee  In a typical one, there'd be maybe five to 10. In the current parliament we've got more than ever, 21 or so, which is a record, and it's very unusual in a European context. There are a lot of independents in Ireland at the moment.