Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 2 February 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

General Scheme of Electoral Reform Bill 2020: Discussion (Resumed)

Dr. Jane Suiter:

-----taking people off the register. Obviously information campaigns could be run on how to vote and what a single transferable vote looks for. We even get some misinformation about it in some of our newspapers sometimes in terms of how the counting actually works so that would be really interesting.

Of course, self-regulation is up. Even Europe is now moving to co-regulation with the platforms. Very much, when one talking to the platforms it is co-regulation. Interesting, in terms of who is in charge, and this comes back to a previous question that we did not have time for, Australia has some of the most developed regulation with the media. The Australian Electoral Commission, AEC, deals with a lot of the disinformation. They got very involved after the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand and so on. Regarding the composition of an electoral commission, obviously there are issues related to the Constitution and without doubt legal expertise is needed. Whether the relationship with the Constitution is the primary function of the electoral commission and, therefore, it must be a judge rather than it might be a judge, I think is something that is maybe worthwhile questioning.

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