Spoiled votes more common in Donegal than almost anywhere else

IN an effort to reduce the number of spoiled or invalid votes here in next week’s local and European elections the electoral commission has issued guidelines on how to ensure your vote counts.

In 2019 a total of 108,488 ballot papers right across the country, in both elections, were deemed to be invalid.

The figures from the commission for the 2019 local elections provided to the Donegal News this week show that County Donegal was among the highest number of spoiled votes in a county council area. Spoiled votes in city and county areas, with bigger populations, were larger.

“This number of votes is the equivalent of the full capacity of Croke Park stadium with another third of the stadium again, or put in another way the equivalent of the combined population of Drogheda, Dundalk and Sligo. The vast majority of these votes were not intentionally spoilt (see tables below).

The people who cast them have no idea that their votes did not count,” a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said.

Donegal had a total of 914 spoiled votes in the local council elections in 2019 which was 1.25 per cent of the votes cast in the county in this poll.

The reasons for the invalidity of the voting papers are as follows: Want of an official mark on the ballot paper 44: First preference not clearly indicated 366: First preference indicated for more than one candidate 485; Writing or mark by which voter could be identified 19.

Interestingly, in counties Laois and Leitrim there were no spoiled votes and County Mayo just had one.

The total number of invalid ballot papers in the local elections in 2019 was 34,618.

In the last European Election in 2019 in the Midlands North West Constituency there were 73,870 spoiled votes.

Back then the constituency was slightly smaller and there were just four seats on offer.

Now the constituency takes in 15 counties across three provinces with a population, according to the 2022 census, of 1.8 million people.

This constituency back then had 21,628 spoiled votes accounting for 3.51 per cent of the total electorate of 1,224,888.

The other two constituencies Dublin – had 15,345 invalid ballot papers with an electorate of 884,118 while the South Constituency with an electorate of 1,417, 017 had 36,897 spoiled votes.

The biggest reason for ballot papers being ruled invalid in the 2019 European Election was ‘First preference not clearly indicated, including unmarked ballots’ – 46,792 in total. 12, 010 of these were in this constituency.

The next largest reason was first preference indicated for more than one candidate 24,095. Of these 8,780 were in this constituency: want of an official mark on a bllot paper total was 819.

In an effort to guide voters the commission has issued a sort video on how to cast your vote. It can be viewed at electoralcommission.ie/how-to-vote/

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