General Election analysis: Ireland’s vote transfer system can be a window of opportunity

Do transfers actually matter?

Well, ask Labour’s Eoghan Kenny or the Social Democrats’ Liam Quaide.

When you’re 30 hours and 15 counts deep, PR-STV starts to get weird.

Counters are no longer looking for twos and threes, they’re looking for 16s and 17s.

The buzz of the big wins on early counts long receded, you begin to unravel trying to remember how a surplus distribution works late in the day when stacks of ballots that were originally number ones for a long eliminated candidate are suddenly back in play.

Ideology, geography, and sense all go out the window as you begin to question if it’s the people in the room or the voices in your head that are beginning to whisper the dreaded word ‘…recount…’.

In most constituencies, in most elections, the candidates who are on top on first preferences will go on to take the available seats, regardless of the back and forth of transfers as the counts go on. But when transfers matter, they really matter.

Though positions might have switched, Cork elected the top five on first preferences in Cork South Central, and the top three in both Cork South West and Cork North West.

In Cork East, a sudden surge put the Social Democrats’ Liam Quaide over the line. The minor embarrassment of addressing an early tweet conceding the election should lift when he updates his handle from councillor to TD.

It wasn’t so easy in Cork North Central.

From the early tallies to the moment Mick Barry called off the recount, the result of the final seat in Cork North Central was unclear.

With three candidates dancing around each other from count to count, the crowd at Nemo Rangers spent two days charting out every possible path to victory.

With just 35 votes of a gap in an election that had just one vote in it earlier on, a recount of some form was not just reasonable, it was necessary.

With ballots bundled into groups of 50, a single, simple error could have made the difference.

The picture emerged quite quickly though, and the original count was accepted.

A recount is not a question of trust, but one of accuracy.

Irish elections are as transparent and thorough as can be, but given the complicated nature of our system, errors can happen.

However, the scale appears to be miniscule.

In 2019 in the same room in Nemo, Sinn Féin MEP Liadh Ní Riada triggered the largest recount in Irish history. On 98,379 votes, just 326 behind the Green Party’s Grace O’Sullivan, a recheck of their almost 200,000 ballots changed the outcome by just one vote.

It’s counts like these that really remind you that every vote matters.