As a comprehensive Catherine Connolly victory looked assured from the earliest tallies, by mid-morning attention had started to shift to the far higher than normal proportion of apparently deliberately spoiled ballots in this election.
An invalid vote sends an ambiguous signal, and already a battle to claim the narrative of what this diverse group of voters meant is beginning to emerge.
By September a #spoilyourvote campaign had begun to take flight on social media. At that stage, it was largely pushed by anti-immigrant influencers and elected officials, and driven at least in part by frustration that candidates such as Nick Delahanty were not gaining the support they needed to get on the ballot paper.
Content claiming that the election process was not fair began to proliferate online, including a false claim that a High Court justice had said the use of the whip system in presidential candidate nominations was not in line with the Constitution.
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This momentum was then seized upon by backers of Maria Steen, and the “spoilyourvote” campaign became fully mainstream. Last Friday, Declan Ganley launched a campaign to encourage voters to write in “1 Maria Steen” on their ballot papers.
[ Kathy Sheridan: No, Maria Steen wasn’t robbed and the election isn’t riggedOpens in new window ]
In a RTÉ News interview, the campaign was framed in a markedly different tone to the more strident narratives circulating online. Ganley said that if voters felt that the two candidates “do not represent you; if they don’t motivate you to want to vote for them; if you can’t be enthusiastic about casting a vote for them, there is another option”. This gentler narrative of a “protest vote” came the day after polling by The Irish Times/Ipsos – which put Connolly an unassailable 18 points in advance of Humphreys – found that 48 per cent of voters didn’t “feel represented by any of the candidates”.
In the lead-up to polling day, videos were circulating on TikTok and other platforms urging people to spoil their votes.
There is not yet any clear metric of the scale of this content – indeed, plenty of anti-spoil videos were published too. On polling day itself photos of ballots being spoiled were circulating online, with platforms failing to take them down despite it being illegal to take such photos.
Other images are coming in from count centres of eye-catching statements on ballots as they emerged from the boxes. I was at a count centre this morning and was struck by the unusual number of votes cast for neither candidate – but most of the ones I saw had simple “X”s across the paper. Only a few had any sort of political slogan.
That will not stop the battle that is already emerging to claim a narrative behind the spoiled-vote campaign. But the Irish electorate is used to a wide range of options – and reasons for spoiled ballots are probably as varied as the political leanings of a country with 10 parties in Dáil Éireann and almost 10 per cent Independent TDs.
For now, though, just two things are clear: that a very large majority of the people who voted wanted Connolly to be president; and that a smaller but significant number of people who went to the polling station did not feel represented by any candidate on the ballot.
