Voting

The Irish General Election is finally upon us (thank god), and even with an eve of polling day silent media there's a great sense of drama about the event. Given the highly competitive nature of the present campaign we can only hope that there will be a high turn out, though the numbers will be lessened somewhat by the fact that Thursday is a dreadful day to hold an election (a very cynical move on the part of the government). Why not the weekend, so that students and the many thousands of voters from outside Dublin who work in the city can return home to vote?

While some will argue that it is possible for them to register and vote in whatever Dublin consitutency they happen to live in at present, many people who have moved to Dublin for work and perhaps change rented accomodation every couple of years will have much stronger ties with their own communities in the places they originally came from and a much stronger interest in the candidates being elected than they do in what for many seems like a somewhat temporary home in Dublin.

The other issue is that of having the vote take place on one single day. Why not have voting spread over an extended period of time, say 3 days, as they have done with great success (in terms of numbers of people turning out to vote) in other European countries such as Finland.
Surely having results which reflect the wishes of the greatest number of people should be the objective.

In a defence of the electronic voting system upon which so much public money was squandered, Bertie Ahern has said that we are the laughing stock of Europe because we have to wait so long for our votes to be counted. While he may have been trying to appeal to some kind of locker room sense of insecurity about what the other lads in Europe will think of him when he has to meet them, the truth of the matter is that waiting a day and a half to get our results counted is absolutely acceptable if it provides a transparent and secure system of counting. Do we really want to have 100,000 spoilt votes like they had in Scotland recently? Just for the sake of knowing the outcome sooner? Much better the old system, even if it could do with reform, and at least there's a bit of excitement watching the results coming in and seeing what kind of shape the governemnt of the next five years is going to take.

As for how the results are going to pan out, I have no idea which way its going to fall. I support Labour, and before Monday's polls it looked like the alternative slightly ahead, but its all to play for now, whatever Fianna Fail have to say. The suspense is killing me.