Dr. Liam Weeks:

I was referring to everyone, really. I recall about £500 million being spent on advertising the e-voting process. I do not just mean young voters, because young voters are not the only first-time voters. I mentioned members of the Traveller community and the hundreds of thousands of non-Irish people in this country who are entitled to vote at local and European elections. They use entirely different voting systems. We have a very unusual voting system. Only one other lower house of parliament in the world uses our voting system and that is Malta. It is not a simple "X marks the spot." Most ballot papers in most countries involve a party list system, so it is just an "X". That is not the way our system works. In Australia, a person must cast a preference for every single candidate or his or her vote is not counted. I know that counting officers in Ireland are quite liberal, so if a person starts his or her preferences with 68 or 72, I believe that vote is still counted as long as a clear preference is indicated - for example, if the person starts with 72 and then continues with 73 and so on.

I do not see the education process as taking place just in schools. In my original submission to the committee a few weeks ago, I likened it to being handed the keys to a car and being told the instructions are on the dashboard and to go ahead. Those are the only instructions being given by the Department. A person gets a ballot paper and at the top there is an instruction to vote one, two, three and so on. When I voted in the recent referendums on marriage equality and the age of presidential eligibility, old people in the school asked me what it was about because there was no mention on the ballot paper of the actual text of the change that was going to be inserted into the Constitution. This was the first time people were thinking about this. Simple public information is available in other countries, be it in post offices, on television and radio or in newspapers. It is quite a simple system.

Even when people are told to vote one, two three and so on, the average number of preferences cast in Ireland is three. That is not the average number of candidates. I know that at the last election there were at least a dozen candidates in most constituencies, but people just stop at the third or fourth preference. They say, "What's the point? Is this third or fourth preference going to count?". I teach modules on elections in university and my own students tell me that their fourth preference is worth only a quarter of a vote so it is not as important as the first preference. There is a severe lack of information. Even having questions from Deputies about how the voting system works indicates that there is some failure in the process.