Taoiseach Wrong on Thursday Poll

In todays Irish Times (subs req’d), Bertie gives his reasons for a Thursday poll;

“I listened to the argument the last time. And it didn’t work. Friday did not work. I was all over the city on the Friday. What people do now is get out of the city on a Friday afternoon. You might say that that would help in the country, but the polls in the city were very, very low after 6 o’clock…

With the clean-up of the register those people are now registered in Dublin. They are registered here.”

These are, simply, rubbish.

• The Taoiseach is correct that the 2002 General Election held on a Friday had a lower turnout. The Taoiseach is not correct however to state that Thursday is a more prefereable day.
• In 2002 the Nice Referendum was rerun on a Saturday, with turnout increasing by almost 50%
• At that time in an interview with RTE (available here http://www.rte.ie/news/2002/0919/6news/6news56_1c.ram ), the Taoiseach had this to say about Saturday voting;
• Interviewer: Why did you pick Saturday as polling day?
  Taoiseach: The view of the government…was we should give Saturday a chance…We have never done that in this country so hopefully we can maximise a very high vote. There is a lot of third level institutions in this country now and Saturday brings them home. there is a lot of other people around the country working all week and Saturday will bring them home to their constituencies
  Interviewer: Isn’t that a risk with so much apathy?
  Taoiseach: This should help them, young people particularly the students unions and others have said they need to be facilitated…by going on a Saturday it gives them an opportunity to turn out
• Saturday polling worked then, why is weekend voting not deemed to be suitable now?
• Political Science research has suggested a Sunday turnout is worth a 5%-8% increase in turnout.
• The reason relied on this morning by An Taoiseach is that we have corrected the electoral register however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
• According to the Sunday Tribune (4/2/2007) the register is still out by 575,000 voters. Over half a million people not correctly registered.
• An attempt by the USI to register students to vote was stopped because it was felt the register could not cope with the possibility of double registrations.

Edit: Thanks to Labour for highlighting the campaign on their front page blog, more facts and figures from them here;

“The Government is ignoring its own statistics on what people want. The Central Statistics Office publish a major survey of voting attitudes from 2002. While six people out of ten said that it made no different to them what day the election was called, of those who said it mattered more than half wanted Saturday. When you then look at the breakdown of statistics an interesting pattern emerges.

For young people Saturday voting was even more important - 40.1 per cent of people aged 18 or 19 favoured Saturday for polling day, while 36.6 per cent of the 19 to 24-year-old age bracket wanted to vote on Saturday. More than half of the students surveyed preferred a Saturday vote.

Those who failred to vote in 2002 were just as clear about wanting to vote on Saturday - with 30% of young people who did not vote giving ‘being busy or away’ as the reason.

With this sort of official information to hand, you have to wonder why the Government is so keen to make voting so inconvenient.”

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