Electoral Reform committee  I suppose it would be efficient if one person produced a satisfactory conclusion and the other one didn't. From the point of view of the voter, it's efficient if you get the best outcome. Maybe if all MPs were as efficient as the best one, then the voter wouldn't have needed to g

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's true, and it's only since the 1990s that we've had coalitions involving Fianna Fáil, our largest party. It used to say it didn't do coalitions, but at a certain point, it started to do coalitions, and then they were perfectly normal. We've had a lot of governments

Electoral Reform committee  There are lots of ways of doing that. In Australia it's done differently than it is in Ireland, and even within Ireland, when we elect the upper house, the Seanad, it's done in a different way. Essentially, it's seen as a random process in which the votes transferred are a cross-

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, we've had more than 30 referendums. Every change to the constitution needs a referendum in Ireland.

Electoral Reform committee  It was 1937.

Electoral Reform committee  PR by single transferable vote is in the constitution. The minimum number of MPs for a constituency is three, and that's in the constitution. Many of the other details, however, are laid out in law.

Electoral Reform committee  That's right, yes. The first one was lost only very narrowly, but the second one lost pretty heavily.

Electoral Reform committee  It came, I'm afraid, almost entirely from political motivation. The biggest party in the country, Fianna Fáil, which had done pretty well and usually won a majority, saw its future as being a bit less rosy than its past had been and thought that in order to guarantee winning a ma

Electoral Reform committee  That's right.

Electoral Reform committee  I would say so. People are accustomed to referendums these days. We have four or five every decade, and it seems right and proper that big issues should be put to a referendum. We have a special commission set up to inform the public about the arguments on each side, and this com

Electoral Reform committee  I'd probably disagree with my colleague that it's been a positive experience. I think most of the research we have on referendums—and there are some exceptions—suggests that people were unclear about what they were voting for and unclear about the consequences. I think the most r

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's absolutely right. Yes, for the voter it really is very straightforward to vote. The counting process, like a lot of counting processes, actually, with a lot of electoral systems, can sound complicated if you go through a stage-by-stage account, but for the voter, i

Electoral Reform committee  Can I just add one caveat to that? In Malta, for instance, which uses the same system, the ballot is structured by party. That, I think, probably makes it even easier for the voters, because sometimes it can be quite hard to find all the candidates of your party on a long list.

Electoral Reform committee  In simple terms, we don't have online voting. Postal voting is very difficult here, and I think online voting is a long way away.

Electoral Reform committee  There is research on postal voting. In some jurisdictions, I think Sweden, most people vote long before the election takes place. The hope was that postal voting would make it easier to vote, and therefore would raise turnout. Most of the research with which I am familiar says th