by Luke Flanagan

With the presidential election taking place this Friday, Irish people will be taking to polling stations to vote for Heather Humphreys or Catherine Connolly.  

There is a significant portion of the electorate that feels disillusioned and disenfranchised with the two candidates. They feel that neither candidate represents them and would ideally vote for a different candidate, whether that be Maria Steen or another candidate that did not make it onto the ballot.

Some may consider voting for what they perceive to be the best of a bad bunch, but others can’t bring themselves to vote for a candidate they don’t agree with at all. It was from this feeling of disillusionment that the Spoil Your Vote movement emerged. 

In order to get onto the ballot, a candidate must be nominated by 20 members of the Oireachtas or four local authorities. During the nomination process, Fine Gael instructed its councillors not to support independent candidates, which made it much more difficult for independents to get enough nominations.  

Independent candidate, Maria Steen, managed secured 18 nominations from Oireachtas members, falling two short of the 20 required. Many believe that she would have secured the two additional nominations needed without Fine Gael blocking their councillors from nominating independents and many councillors choosing to abstain from nominating anyone.  

With only Catherine Connolly, Heather Humphreys and Jim Gavin, who later withdrew from the race, on the ballot, many people felt there was no candidate that represented them.

This is where the Spoil the Vote campaign started. While it will have no influence on the result of the election, people view spoiling their vote as a form of protest and a way of sending a message of discontent with the lack of choice in the election. 

The campaign has a very strong online presence. Last week, SpoilTheVote.ie, an online campaign founded by well-known Irish political commentators, entrepreneurs and public figures, was launched.

According to their website, the campaign was founded ‘in response to growing public concern about the lack of choice in the forthcoming general election’. The campaign urges people to spoil their vote on Friday the 24th of October. One of the leaders of the campaign, independent politician Elaine Mullally says that “Your vote is your voice, make it count”.

“When the system offers no real choice, spoiling your vote is a legitimate way to stand up for democracy and fairness,” Muallaly said. 

We spoke to Michael McCarthy, a social media content creator and one of the founders of SpoilTheVote.ie, and this is what he had to say about the motivation behind the campaign:

‘Almost half of voters feel that they aren’t represented in this election. That is a huge amount of people that have no one to vote for. I get a lot of questions ’Michael, if you spoil your vote one of them will get in anyways. One of the two is going to get elected, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t care who it is. If it’s Heather, I don’t care, if it’s Catherine, I don’t care, none of them represent us,’ said McCarthy.

“The idea with spoiling a vote is that it’s a protest,” said McCarthy.

“If we can get hundreds of thousands of people to spoil their ballot, it sends a sign. It’ll be a bigger news story than whoever gets the presidency. They didn’t allow great candidates to be on the ballot. We could have had serious debates, we could have had different opinions, different perspectives. But the Government decided against that. They decided who we get to vote for, that’s not fair. If they were good, honourable people, they would’ve allowed all of us to have a chance to vote for someone we like,” he added.

According to a recent poll conducted by Ipsos B&A for The Irish Times, 6% of people said they plan to spoil their vote, which is a significant increase from the usual number of spoiled votes, which is about 1%.