Electoral Reform committee  The nature of the single transferable vote is that the citizens' preference for an individual candidate is paramount and they're not forced to vote for a party. When they're asked if they would vote for that candidate even if the candidate stood for a different party, quite often

Electoral Reform committee  One can see it as a factor combining and interacting with a number of other factors. It's quite possible that if we had a different electoral system, if we had first past the post, turnout would be even lower. In my opinion, the electoral system is not responsible for a huge amou

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, our experience with electronic voting was a very ill-fated one. It's seen as one of the great policy blunders in Ireland that these out-of-date machines were bought. They had out-of-date software and there was no paper validation, and electronic voting is always coupled with

Electoral Reform committee  I think more people used to vote. Fewer people vote now. That's not because of the system, but because politics used to mobilize people and doesn't anymore. The same system in Malta gets something like 95% of voters to the ballot. They go because they think it makes a difference.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  That's right.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, that's right, and they made an electoral virtue of it. They said they were a single-party government and if the others got in, there would be a coalition, and that would be bad. However, in 1989 they did so poorly that they could only stay in government by forming a coalitio

Electoral Reform committee  Not quite. If the quota is 10,000 and one candidate gets 12,000 first preferences, what happens is that all of those 12,000 votes are looked at, and if 50% of them have a second preference for candidate X, then half of the surplus—that's 1,000 votes—would go to candidate X. It's

Electoral Reform committee  Exactly.

Electoral Reform committee  It can and is done electronically in other jurisdictions, so it doesn't have to take very long. When it's done electronically, it can typically be done in a rather more sophisticated way than when it's done by hand.

Electoral Reform committee  Transparency is very important. One of the wonderful things about the by-hand counting in this country is that it's the one day of the year when everybody is interested in politics. They turn on their televisions because there is a live game show going on all day, if not two days

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  Exactly.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I would say so.

Electoral Reform committee  We see that here, and people will often contact more than one TD, one MP, to try to resolve their problems, and since a lot of that now takes place by email rather than by tramping along to a local constituency office, it's fairly easy to blind-copy all the TDs in the constituenc