Proving they don’t know the first thing about Irish democracy

I was wondering how the far-right would take the fact that of 949 council seats they managed a paltry handful.

Given the nature of local elections, the proportionality of the vote, the openness of it to new candidates, it’s hard to take a better measure of the temperature of the voting public. That handful is thin reward for all their shouting and swearing and worse. Though it is another lesson for those who think online activity = offline activity. 

And it neatly skewers the idea that there’s some huge silent majority on ‘their’ side. There’s no pleasure in seeing any elected. There’s some pleasure though, quite a lot, in seeing how badly they’ve done as against their grand claims. 

In the face of all that, let’s call it reality, how do they react? No better time than to open the far right playbook and decide that… despite that handful being elected, there was election fraud. 

A number of far-right groups who look to have underperformed in the local elections have started spreading baseless claims of election fraud.

Without offering evidence, several activists are claiming possible fraud based on the movement of votes between count centres for tallying and counting. In several cases, posts shared online compare the activity to the 2020 US presidential election, during which supporters of Republican candidate Donald Trump made similarly baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Although it appears a small number of far-right candidates will be elected to city or county councils, there has been no significant breakthrough. Instead, less extreme independent candidates appear to have overperformed, along with the Government parties.

Counting in the local elections started on Saturday, while counting in the European elections began on Sunday morning.

And:

In the last two days, various claims of election fraud or interference have circulated, some of which have been viewed many thousands of times.

In some cases, these are based on a misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, of how votes are counted in the local elections.

Deliberate or otherwise? That’s being kind. 

And:

…a far-right candidate standing in Shankhill in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, who has a history of spreading false information, posted a message titled “this is looking like voter fraud”. The post asks why votes are being moved from the count centre in the RDS in Dublin to Weston Airport.

It is standard practice to separate votes in the European and local elections and count them in different locations in order to speed up the count process. This has happened in previous elections and is a feature of counts across the country. Votes are transported in sealed boxes and with a Garda escort.

“Local elections counts take place at different venues to the counts for the European elections. These are the normal arrangements that have applied previously at European and Local Elections,” a spokesman for the Department of Local Government said.

Other claims that are being spread widely included that immigrants were illegally allowed to vote and run in the local elections.

For example:

…a far-right candidate who failed to get elected in Castlebar, posted a video titled “election interference in full flow”, complaining of reports of “a dozen and a half African people” in a Mayo polling station on Friday.

He also posted a photo purporting to be part of an Electoral Register, complaining about the number of “foreign” looking names on it. The video has been viewed 26,000 times.

But what this person doesn’t appear to know is that:

All people who are resident in the State have been allowed to vote in local elections since the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution passed in 1999. EU citizens who are resident in Ireland can vote in the European elections. Neither group can vote in general elections.

These guys have clearly never been within a sniff of a count centre, an election or any of that in their lives. They claim to speak for Ireland and they know nothing of it. 

Speaking of which, cheering news from Gript – not words you’ll read every day. As a friend noted, they see the elections as a set back with a disunited far right (they don’t apparently consider Aontú and Independent Ireland as a part of that gene pool – interesting) going in the wrong direction. As my friend said, ‘I’ll take their word for it’. This doesn’t mean there’s not a threat there and a necessity to engage with both the dynamics that generate support for them and to place political obstacles against them.

Yet, despite all the noise and a media, portions of it at least, have bigged up immigration  as an issue to a great degree this last year or so, to the extent of suggesting that it would be the primary issue at these elections what has been proven has been otherwise. When it came to the most empirical test there is, placing it before the actual Irish people, it was shown to be largely the obsession of a tiny minority with a broader but still small minority halo of soft support. There’s a lesson in that for the media and parts of the political class.