Observing the election January 28, 2016

Posted by Tomboktu in Election observation

As far as I can see, there will be no international election observer mission coming to Ireland for this year’s general election. That does not mean our elections are perfect, and in the last two general elections, international observers identified problems in a range of areas, including campaign financing, the quality of the electoral register, constraints on civil society organisations undertaking advocacy during a campaign, among other issues, and the law on election observation. (Limited international observation missions visited for the 2007 and 2011 elections. Their reports are available here and here.) But because the shortcomings are with the regulations governing elections rather than significant dodgy practice on polling day or at the count, I expect that they see little point in spending money to send observers here for a third time when the problems will not occur at the actual poll itself or the count.

The orderly conduct of polls and counts should not be discounted. I participated in an election observation mission with another Irish observer who, on a previous mission, had been forced to leave his assigned observation area when gunmen arrived arrived at the polling station where he was observing and took it over. He and his Nordic partner withdrew, as did observers at other stations in a small number of districts where polling stations were also taken over by gunmen. (He told me that at the debriefing the following day, he and his partner noticed that the all of the observers whom the OSCE had sent to the regions where gunmen took over polling stations had jobs back in their own countries that involved experience and training in the use of firearms — in his case as a detective Garda, and in his partner’s case as an army officer. The international observers who had professions that did not provide that expertise all appeared to have been sent to safer districts.)

The most important problem that the international observers have warned us about in Ireland is campaign financing. In 2007, the OSCE noted that strict campaign finance rules are in place, but it also stated (at page 4):

practice shows that actual campaign spending begins long before the stipulated period, and some interlocutors expressed the view that spending during the pre-election period rendered limits almost obsolete.

However, there is another underlying problem with our elections that is not likely to be noticed by international observers, namely complacency. At the moment, we can afford to be complacent about how our elections are run, but I wonder if that would be the case today if Haughey had ever secured an overall majority or if Ahern, who was uninterrupted Taoiseach for eleven years, had been as devious, as cunning, or as corrupt as his mentor had been. Unlike the situation in other countries, we — and, more importantly, our candidates — are generally happy to have ballot boxes out of the sight of representatives of candidates and parties and under Garda protection over the night between the close of polls and the start of the count, with sealing wax on on the doors of a basketball hall as ‘proof’ that the boxes had not been tampered with. Although the ritual at the count involves a petit show of the the count official emptying the ballot box onto the table in front of the tally women and men and then showing an empty box to the observers, the seals placed on the ballot boxes at the close of the polls are cut open in an efficient but intransparent process en masse well behind the barriers, where the observers cannot confirm that boxes were in fact unopened from the day before. And our seals are a dob of wax with a generic stamp, which contrasts with the traceable seals used for polling boxes in other countries. In some, the seals are small plastic ties with individual serial numbers, and great play is made of recording the serial number as the box is sealed before the first vote is cast and checking that the serial number is the same at the ed of the day before the ballot box is opened for the count. In other, those plastic seals are supplemented with adhesive stickers that polling station officials and party observers all sign.

Also, on polling day — at least in Dublin — we are happy to leave the returning officer’s staff to run the poll without representatives of candidates constantly present throughout the day to check the integrity of the process. That contrasts with the practice when I first became involved with Irish electoral procedures, as a poll clerk at the referendum on the eighth amendment, when personation agents were the norm. The OSCE recommended that the law be amended to provide for observers at polling stations who are not representatives of parties or candidates. I have no idea if that would be an effective substitution, but the lack of observers and agents in the current good electoral times may cost us if the respect for the ‘front of house’ democratic procedures is ever undermined

A second significant problem which is grounded in complacency is the limited transparency of our electoral register. I remember my surprise when I first travelled abroad to help observe an election to see the electoral roll posted on the windows of the polling station the day before voting for all to read. I learnt that it had been there for some days, and an earlier draft of the electoral roll had also been actively displayed some weeks earlier. The ability of the community to inspect the register was an important part of the process: it wasn’t enough that you, as an individual, could check that you were on the voter list. It was also vital that there was a transparent process to enable fraudulent registration of voters in the empty house to be caught. In Ireland, our data privacy laws mean that is not possible, and it would be possible for non-existent voters to be registered at an unoccupied address.

It is a pity that the OSCE did not send even a small assessment mission in advance of this year’s general election, even if only to restate the shortcomings of our electoral laws, particularly in campaign finances. On the other hand, I suspect that those who might be best placed to challenge those weaknesses which the OSCE has not raised are to busy trying to get somebody elected to have time to deal with the other weaknesses. But we need to deal with those before they become real problems. We already live, to our cost, with the failure to properly control access to money to fund election campaigns.