Absence of votes on Limerick ballot papers creates confusion

WHY would you go to the trouble of driving, walking or cycling to your local polling station, going in, getting your ballot papers but not writing anything on them?

That’s exactly what happened in Limerick as the Leader has learned that “a lot” of votes were “just not marked at all”. A silent protest, perhaps?

We have crunched the numbers to find that there were 1,037 invalid votes in the local election in the city and county. That is out of a total poll of 81,833 so 1.27% of the votes were invalid.

The mayoral election had a valid poll of 81,668 (slightly more for a democratically elected mayor compared to the local election).

The reasons for invalid votes vary. Apparently, there was scripture from the bible written on some ballot papers. However, there were no holy medals found in the ballot boxes like in previous votes.

Other reasons were an invalid paper is people put a tick in the box beside a candidate’s name instead of putting in numbers.

An easy mistake to mistake, especially just following a referendum only a couple of months ago.

It was also an easy mistake to mix up your numbers, for example, going 1, 2, 4 and forgetting to put in a three. It was especially simple to do with the European ballot paper which was as long as your arm and you had to scan up and down it while there was a queue outside the booth waiting to come in.

A blunt pencil can also confuse matters - is that a 1 or a 7?

An official at the count centre told the Limerick Leader that they do everything in their power to include a vote. They take into consideration that it could be an elderly person, somebody with a disability or have poor eyesight.

Call-outs can be regularly heard over the tannoy that disputed votes have been collated and could the candidate or their agent make their way to the count centre to decide on them.

This actually took an hour or two on Monday in relation to the over 1,000 invalid papers in the mayoral election.