Dr. Liam Weeks:

The Chairman mentioned that returning officers look at the last bundle of votes. In the likes of Longford-Roscommon, it affected Denis Naughten in 1997 when he only got 23% of transfers from his running mate because his running mate was from a different county. The simple method is to pick the whole pile. Why pick just the top pile? For example, Scotland adopted the single transferable vote for local government elections a couple of years ago and it uses the weighted, inclusive Gregory method. It is also used in Australia. The issue for returning officers is in examining the whole pile of votes. Let us say the surplus coming to a candidate is 100 votes, but the entire pile of papers is 1,000. That means one will be dealing with fractions and each ballot is only worth one tenth of the vote. When a candidate receives the surplus, if that is undertsandable, all of his or her ballot papers with his or her first preferences are worth one vote, but the ballot papers he or she receives from a running mate are only worth one tenth. What happens if that puts the candidate over the surplus? There will be fractions of fractions. However, that is the method used in other systems because, if the votes are there, what reason is there for not counting them? It is a far more equitable system. When we adopted e-voting on a pilot basis, this was not the system recommended largely because it would have meant different rules for different constituencies. I can understand that one would probably need machines to count fractions of fractions. It was done once by hand in Australia and the votes got mixed up. Some ballot papers ended up being worth more than one actual vote, if that is clear.