Unprecedented level of spoiled votes with suspected excrement on one ballot paper in Cork

While Catherine Connolly’s landslide 63.36% win — and the damage inflicted on the Civil War parties — was the headline story of the presidential election, that some 12.9% of the turnout spoiled their vote was also a huge development.

Spoiling a vote is an entirely valid expression of democracy, and a number of campaigns encouraging spoiled votes sprang up over the course of the election, seeking to capitalise on voter frustration at the choice of candidates and the exclusion of others.

This presidential election saw an unprecedented number of spoiled ballots — 213,738 invalid votes from a total poll of 1,656,436, representing 12.9%.

By contrast, the 2018 presidential election saw 18,438 spoiled ballots, or 1.2%. Conventional wisdom would suggest that about half of those were probably accidental, but nobody would soberly argue that much more than a tiny fraction were accidental this time out.

The difference between the number of spoiled votes in 2018 and this year’s presidential election marked an increase of 975%.

Many spoiled ballots had crosses drawn across the entire paper or over each of the boxes after the three candidates. Some featured messages written on the ballot paper, including the names of putative alternative candidates, both real and imaginary, while a small number of ballots were physically altered to add mocked-up additional options.

The messages were largely what you’d expect, with the word “joke” written on several, while the phrase “not my president” also featured, as well as numerous anti-immigrant screeds, and many had various words of profanity written on them.

Maria Steen was named on several, while Billy Kelleher, Conor McGregor, Enoch Burke, and even Donald Trump picked up the odd endorsement too. Brad Pitt got a mention also, as did Postman Pat.

INCIDENT

By far the most egregious example of a spoiled vote was found at the County Cork count centre in Mallow, where a ballot was smeared with a brown substance, suspected to be excrement, and the words “SHIT REAL SHIT” written in pen on the page.

Sinead McNamara, returning officer for Cork, confirmed to The Echo that the incident had occurred.

“It was the deputy returning officer for Cork North West who found a ballot paper with a brown substance on it, the word ‘s’, ‘h’, blank, ‘t’ was written on it and the word real, so we had to assume it was real excrement, so the vote was put into a plastic pouch and will obviously be treated separately,” Ms McNamara said.

There was nothing so dramatic found among the spoiled votes in the Cork city count centre in Nemo Rangers, but as the boxes were opened and ballots tumbled out, paper after paper was crossed over or had crosses drawn on each box.

One tallied ballot box from Knocknaheeny indicated that spoiled votes accounted for more than twice the combined ballots for Jim Gavin and Heather Humphreys.

Mr Gavin got nine votes, while Ms Humphreys got 15, compared to 71 spoiled ballots.

Speaking after the declaration of Ms Connolly as president-elect, Taoiseach Micheál Martin expressed concern at the level of spoiled votes and said Government was open to changing the presidential nomination process, but would need the support of other political parties.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said the level of spoiled votes showed there were “a lot of people who felt disconnected from this election”.