The Cedar Lounge Revolution

That High Number of Spoilt Votes ….. November 2, 2011

On Thursday last we had a Presidential Election, Two Referendums and a By-Election in Dublin West.
One thing that jumped out at me was the number of Spoilt votes.
For instance there were nearly as many spolit votes in the Oireachtas Inquiries Referendum than votes for Mary Davis in the Presidential Election. With many people not feeling fully informed on that particular Referendum there were tales of blank ballots or indeed people not taking the ballot, so the high number of spoilt votes is understandable.
I was puzzled though by the number of spoilt votes in the Dublin West By-Election, especially in relation to the spoilt votes in the other electoral contests taking place there on the same day.

Spoilt vote Figures for Dublin West
In the Presidential Election there were 370 (1.02%) Spoilt votes
In the Judges Pay Referendum there were 399 (1.1%) Spoilt Votes
In the Oireachtas Inquiries Referendum there were 477 (1.32%) Spoilt Votes
In the By-Election there were 689 (1.89%) spolit votes.

The spoilt vote figure for the by-election of 689 (1.89%) seems quite high (higher than combined vote of the bottom 5 candidates), especially as in February’s General Election there were 327 (0.76%) spoilt votes. There were 10 candidate in February , yet 13 candidates in the By-Election so there was more choice party and candidate wise at the By-Election than the General Election.
Were papers put in the wrong polling boxes? or was it further disenchantment with the political system? or something else altogether?

Nationally the number of spoilt votes for the Presidential Election was quite high, this despite there being a record number of candidates. You have to go back to the first two Presidential Elections before you find Spoilt vote figures as high. (anyone know why they were so high?)

1945 50,287 4.42%
1959 24,089 2.46%
1966 9,910 0.89%
1973 6,946 0.56%
1990 9,444 0.60%
1997 9,852 0.77%
2011 18,676 1.04%

Again was it disenchantment with the runners? or simple mistakes.

The Referendum on Judges pay also had quite a number of Spoilt Votes with 37,696 (2.11%).

Spoilt Votes Referendum since 2000
2011 Oireachtas Inquiry  45,025 (2.52%)
2011 Judges Pay             37,696 (2.11%)
2009 Lisbon 2                7,224 (0.40%)
2008 Lisbon 1                 6,171 (0.38%)
2004 Citizenship             20,219 (1.11%)
2002 Nice                   5,384 (0.37%)
2002 Abortion               6,649 (0.53%)
2001 Nice                     14,887 (1.49%)
2001 ICC                     17,819 (1.79%)
2001 Death Penalty          14,480 (1.45%)

Is it confusion, disenchantment or whats happening?

An interesting analysis of the Presidential election… But… November 2, 2011

Here’s an interesting analysis from ‘electoral analyst’ Odran Flynn in the Irish Times. Interesting, but…

He argues that:

When the polls on the last weekend of the campaign were published, Gallagher was the biggest obstacle to Sinn Féin’s plan to subsume the bulk of the Fianna Fáil vote. He had attracted and galvanised the majority of that vote, while also garnering significant numbers who had deserted Fianna Fáil in February to vote for other parties.

He continues:

While the attack on Gallagher certainly cost him the presidency, a detailed analysis of the results, show that it was a pyrrhic victory for Sinn Féin.

And that:

T

he attack on Gallagher was predicated on the belief that it would cause his vote to collapse and further weaken Fianna Fáil to the benefit of Sinn Féin. This did not happen as Fianna Fáil supporters, offended by the attack on a candidate who had only one degree of separation from their party, flocked to Gallagher in their hundreds of thousands.

There are two suppositions here. Firstly that an attack by McGuinness would operate to swing Gallagher voters to SF – and implicitly that SF would believe that to be the case and therefore would carry out such an attack precisely for that reason. Now, my own instinct in such matters is that those who wield the knife in politics are rarely the direct beneficiary of such acts. Moreover, as I wrote at the time, my further instinct was that the SF action could only be to the benefit of Michael D. Higgins and/or Labour, in other words that the Gallagher vote would not stream to SF in any great numbers but instead would desert Gallagher for Higgins. Of course my instinct means next to nothing, but consider the analysis of other commentators and they too at the time only saw this as benefiting Higgins, not SF or at least not directly. And that makes it seem more likely that SF viewed this not in terms of bolstering McGuinness, who they must have known was unlikely to increase his vote much further, but more as taking Gallagher down and indirectly blocking the path for a candidate who would – had he won – certainly given heart to many in FF and therefore consolidate that vote for the future and at much much higher levels were the polls the previous weekend to be believed. That’s quite a distinctly different process from that being proposed by Flynn.

Secondly, the idea that Fianna Fáil supporters ‘offended by an attack on a candidate… etc’ therefore flocked to Gallagher in the wake of the McGuinness intervention doesn’t seem to entirely hang together. The polling data was clear, the FF voters were already there – though I’m not entirely convinced that we can see Gallagher as reducible to a simple FF proxy, but more of that later. And Flynn offers no evidence for the contention, except the following:

As political commentator Johnny Fallon astutely observed when he was in the Newstalk studio with me on Friday, those supporters will not forgive Sinn Féin. Their anger had the impact of stopping the Sinn Féin advance dead in its tracks.

Well then it must be true. Except there was no SF advance, at least not in the context of the Presidential campaign by the Monday of the FrontLine debate. SF had been beaten back from initial polling figures in the high teens by a campaign characterised by relentless attacks on Martin McGuinness – arguably the most relentless attacks, other than those on Norris, on any Irish political figure in living memory.

What were those McGuinness polling numbers? Well, September 25 saw him on 16 per cent in the SBP, October 6 saw him on 19 per cent in the IT, he was on 16 per cent in the Paddy Power/Red C poll the same day, 16 October saw him on 13 per cent in the SBP. 22 October saw him still on 13 pre cent in the SBP while the next day the IT had him on 15 per cent. Take any of those polls sequentially, ie the SBP across the campaign or the IT across the campaign and it’s clear that from 6 October his vote was decreasing albeit… and presumably this is because his vote was within the margin of error, it was almost a percentage point higher than the SBP tallies.

But Flynn mentions that dynamic not at all because it’s highly inconvenient to his thesis of an SF which was advancing up to the point where McGuinness pulled the plug on the Gallagher candidacy and then due to a lack of ‘forgiveness’ by erstwhile FF voters who were even then only champing at the bit to support their former party.

But what of this?

As the accompanying table demonstrates, Sinn Féin – despite claims to the contrary – made no headway last weekend even with the highest-profile candidate they could muster.

Sinn Féin contested 38 of the 43 Dáil constituencies last February. Comparing that performance to the same 38 constituencies last Thursday, the party only managed a net increase of 1,390 votes, or an average of a mere 37 votes a constituency. Gallagher, on the other hand, achieved a 31 per cent increase on the Fianna Fáil vote in those same 38 constituencies.

And…

Furthermore, when the performance in the 14 constituencies where Sinn Féin had TDs elected in February is analysed, it shows that it lost more than 26,000 votes, a drop in its share of the vote of 20.6 per cent, or one-fifth.

And…

Of the 14 constituencies, only Cork North Central improved on February, while half of them had Sinn Féin support fall by more than 2,000 votes. This compares unfavourably with Gallagher’s performance, which had him improve on the Fianna Fáil February vote by 37.2 per cent in the same group of constituencies.

Perhaps I’m way off beam here, but is he comparing like with like? The turnout in the General Election was 2,220,359 or 70.1 per cent, whereas the turnout in the Presidential election was 1,790,438 or 56.1 which skews those figures. Moreover he appears to believe that every vote for Gallagher was a vote from an FF voter. No doubt the majority of them were but all of them? It doesn’t surprise me that Gallagher did significantly better than FF – Fianna Fáil received 17.4 per cent at the General Election [as against 9.9 per cent for SF]. Gallagher was explicitly not an FF candidate and went to great pains to say so throughout the campaign. Nor, and this is equally important, did FF clasp him to their bosom. Otherwise why all the messing around over Gay Byrne? Which is not to say that they wouldn’t be, and are not, quite happy to play up the associations in retrospect. But all this leaves the question as to what an FF voter is 2011 entirely open. Pat Leahy in the SBP makes the point that there is extreme volatility among the electorate and continues:

Their behaviour [voters willing to swing wildly from one position of support to another during the last days of the campaign] suggests a low degree of party loyalty. Notions of ‘Fine Gael voters’ or ‘Fianna Fáil voters’ are much less firm than they used to be. in fact, more and more people are independently minded voters free of any tribal loyalty who choose their candidate according to the election and the campaign.

There’s more problems. Flynn argues that:

[Since] February, the more that the cause of our difficulties shifts away from the last government and on to the effect of the performance of the current Government.
Clearly, the speed of this shift depends on how the economy and the associated evils of unemployment, emigration, mortgages and the increased poverty trap are dealt with by the Government.
This shift in mood is apparent in the results last weekend. The turnout for the presidential election was down some 450,000 votes on February, despite an almost identical electorate. The combined vote of Michael D Higgins and Gay Mitchell was 420,000 fewer than their respective party support last February.

But there’s an obvious problem in his ‘turnout down’ argument. Presidential elections always have a lower turnout than General Elections. In 1997 the turnout was 47.6 per cent, as against IIRC 66 per cent in the General Election that year. Interestingly and I don’t know if this has been referred to elsewhere the 1990 Presidential election had a 64.1 per cent turnout as against 68 per cent in the 1989 General Election and the last contested election before that in 1973 had a 62.2 per cent turnout. Or as noted above we’re not entirely comparing like with like. And, by the way, I’d be the first to accept that just as there is a danger when Flynn elides the Gallagher/FF vote, so there’s a corresponding, though perhaps slightly lesser danger given the nature of the McGuinness candidacy, of eliding the McGuinness vote with SF. What is reasonable to suggest is that those who vote for McGuinness, given his past seem more likely to be willing to in future give a vote, or just a transfer to SF, whereas those who vote for Gallagher don’t seem to me to be so clearly likely to vote [again for] FF.

As an aside I didn’t know, having only passing knowledge of him primarily due to his TV profile, that he was a former FF member until he had joined the campaign and it only slowly came to light that he was an NEC member, etc… so I’d suspect that was a fairly widespread dynamic. In light of that it would have been surprising if he hadn’t done better than the core FF vote, which is precisely what he managed to do, particularly given the historic lows of that FF vote. He could call on that core, sort of kind of, while also broadening it. But whether that now means a capture, or a recapture, of those voters who went to him for FF seems to me to be a very dubious proposition.

But it’s not as if Flynn is unaware of the turnout issue. He argues that:

This shift in mood is apparent in the results last weekend. The turnout for the presidential election was down some 450,000 votes on February, despite an almost identical electorate. The combined vote of Michael D Higgins and Gay Mitchell was 420,000 fewer than their respective party support last February.

Similarly, in the Dublin West byelection, the turnout was down by 6,770 votes while the combined vote of the Labour and Fine Gael candidates fell by 6,400 votes. All this while what was effectively a Fianna Fáil presidential candidate and a bona fide Fianna Fáil byelection candidate were performing very well.

The presidential opinion polls and the actual polls suggest that Fianna Fáil may not be anything like as toxic as many commentators have suggested. If it can find a raft of young energetic candidates and articulate coherent alternative policies, it is well placed not only to see off the threat of Sinn Féin but to play a more influential role much sooner than anyone would have thought possible a few weeks ago.

It’s hard to know what to make of Dublin West. Is the FF vote there a symptom of a continuing sympathy for Lenihan? But it seems far too premature to see it – given those circumstances – as being evidence of an FF about to make a comeback. Though even there Flynn has some curious observations.

Why would FF seem more attractive to them simply because an ersatz FF candidate managed to take some of the FF vote and build on it. That seems more likely to me to point to the potential for others, and granted not necessarily SF, to take that vote and turn it to their own ends. The basic point is that had FF run its own candidate, as it knew well, he or she would have been eviscerated. Gallagher was in some respects – though not all – sui generis, sufficiently of FF but also not exactly in FF to pull in people who wouldn’t dream of voting FF. And even then, when his FF links became more apparent – to those as would bother to look, he was still able, perhaps due to the halo effect of TV celebrity, and in fairness to the man a degree of charm and charisma, to keep hold of a fair few of them. And it doesn’t transcend the problem that even if one sees Gallagher as a gateway vote back to FF, at some point by the logic being presented here those voters would have to vote for FF – an FF that dared not stand in this Presidential election and whose party poll ratings continued to dip south throughout the Presidential election campaign. Some will, no doubt about it, but the evidence remains that this is a fractured FF which is still locked out of contention.

Anyhow, be that as it may, no doubt all this is very comforting for some Irish Times readers worried about SF, and prone to vicarious chills at the thought of a revenant FF, but.. as was noted here at the weekend it was a so-so performance by SF. Good enough in that its vote share remained strong and even increased by three or four percent over its election figures, and more importantly that dynamic was particularly evident in constituencies where it holds seats. Not so good in that it reopened old arguments and perhaps did not entirely lay them to rest, and that these transcended a more strongly significant increase in support. But to argue much more than that either way seems to drift away from what evidence we have. The point was that Sinn Féin contested an Irish Presidential election and garnered close enough to 14 per cent of the vote – remarkably good for a party that as recently as 2007 gained 6.9 per cent. The briefest perusal of previous electoral contests shows how as recently as 1997 Adi Roche for the LP/DL and GP had 6.9 per cent of the vote. And it’s instructive too given the talk about the FF vote to consider how in 1990 Brian Lenihan received 44.1 per cent, in 1997 Mary McAleese [as an FF/PD candidate] received 45.2% of the vote. And Gallagher. 28.5 per cent of the vote.

SF won’t be competing against Sean Gallagher in every constituency again. And FF can’t find a Gallagher for every constituency, finding a ‘raft of young energetic candidates’, some sixty odd would be needed to put FF within a shout of power is no small task as any of us in or having once been in parties can attest. And even if they did it wouldn’t be quite the same because Gallagher wasn’t flagged as an FF candidate and therefore had a broader appeal at least until that FF toxicity began to seep through into his campaign.

Adrian Kavanagh writing on PoliticalReform.ie made the following crucial point, when considering polling data that put SF on 16 per cent in national party political polls during the election.

…this has to be seen as a very good result for that party and suggests that the party may be making political gains resulting from their decision to contest the presidential election and to take the gamble of running a high profile candidate in Martin McGuinness (even if he is not in a position to win the contest). The very polarised geography of support for Sinn Fein means that the party can win a significant number of seats with support levels in the low teens, as this translates into sufficiently high support levels to win seats in their stronger constituencies (and very low support levels in their weak constituencies).

But with an obvious caveat that still applies one way or another…

However, this means that there is a “ceiling” in terms of the potential number of seats they party can win while their support level remains in the 10-20 percent range, as even as support nationally increases they will still be well off the pace in terms of winning seats in their weakest constituencies, such as Dublin South.

Nothing there has changed, but 14 per cent, if SF manages to retain – or even a couple of points above their last general election result, points to a further consolidation and strengthening of their vote [and of course we know remarkably little about some of the preferences cast in this Presidential election].

And worth pointing to two other sources as regards supporting that analysis, Martina Devlin in the Irish Independent, who I quoted last week writing…

While Michael D Higgins will be the ultimate beneficiary of that timely piece of bushwhacking, there should be fringe benefits for McGuinness. It seems likely that some preferences will swap from Gallagher to him. One or two extra percentage points in the polls will make a difference to Sinn Fein, which is in this race for long-term gains.
Any vote above 10pc of the poll — the figure achieved in the general election earlier this year — is a result.

And Pat Leahy in the Sunday Business Post.

Sinn Féin’s campaign worked – and it didn’t. Martin mcGuinness may have occupied a central place in the election campaign and drama, but for much of it he was talking about the very things that SF wants to put behind it.
What’s more he was talking in tones that suggested an unease with the South. Nonetheless, McGuinness grew the vote, if by just three points since February. What did we learn? That the rise of SF continues, albeit slowly. What did SF learn? That the southern resistance to its history of conflict is still strong.

That last is very true. McGuinness referred to it obliquely at the weekend, and it is something that may well exercise SF more now than it has hitherto, and rightly so.