Election 2024: Mayo's returning officer prepares for long weekend

The returning officer for the local elections in Mayo has been preparing staff for what could be a mammoth count.

There are 73 candidates contesting the local elections in the county. That’s 14 extra names on the ballot papers compared to the 2019 election. The electorate will top the 100,000 mark in 2024.

“Preparations are going as well as they can be,” said returning officer for the local elections, John Condon of Mayo County Council.

“We will start counting on Saturday and we will keep counting for as long as it takes to complete the six electoral areas."

Despite the extra candidates, it will be very much business as usual for John and the staff tasked with counting the votes.

“We have the same number of seats available in each of the areas as last time so the task will be very similar to 2019,” said John.

When the boxes are opened on Saturday, it is hoped to get counting up and running for two of the six electoral areas, the first around 11am and the second around 1pm. If they can be concluded on Saturday, counts will get underway for some of the other areas.

“We will work right through Sunday. Last time we managed to get three areas concluded on Saturday and three areas concluded by the early hours of Monday morning,” said John.

He said advance planning is key to ensuring the count runs as smoothly as possible.

“You liaise with everyone involved. For example, the county registrar and the court staff have a big role in this as they organise the polling stations and are responsible for the European ballots. We work together and co-ordinate so we are not tripping each other or duplicating unnecessarily.

“Secondly, with our own staff, we ensure that they know what is expected of them on the day of the count. We do that through training and preparation. They are trained specifically for the different scenarios you might have to face and hopefully they won’t have to deal with every scenario they have prepared for.” 

John said it is difficult to forecast how long the count may last at this stage.

“More candidates mean there will be more losers and therefore it could involve additional counts. On the other hand, if you had a number of candidates who polled very poorly one might be able to exclude them in one go. Also, the more candidates who are in the field, the more difficult it might be for candidates to achieve the quota in the first count and get elected. But until the boxes are opened and we see the tallies we won’t know that.” 

He said the other “imponderable” is the turnout.

“I have seen local election turns outs vary from just over 50% to around 70%. That makes a huge difference to the number of papers you have to deal with.

“We work on the basis that we have everything in place for a high turnout and if the turnout is a bit lower well then that takes the pressure off a bit,” John added.

A Director of Services with Mayo County Council, John has been running the rule over election counts since 1985. He was the returning officer for the count for the election of members to Castlebar Town Council that year. The 1985 Castlebar Town Council election threw up a recount involving two candidates with the same last name.

“There were 19 candidates for nine seats, and we finished the count around 9pm before there was a request for a recount because there were two candidates with the same last name (Fianna Fáil’s Eamon Joyce and Fine Gael’s Bernie Joyce) who were separated by four votes for the final seat. We did the recount there and then and finished around midnight. It was Eamon Joyce who won the seat,” John recalled.

The abolition of the three town councils in 2014 has simplified the counting process.

“You would have had nine counts going on in the county, now you only have six counts going on. That reduces things a bit, also when there were town council elections, there used to be separate ballot boxes and some voters would inevitably put the wrong ballot papers into the wrong boxes. People would be travelling back and forth to the various towns to correct those errors. Now every citizen in the county has a vote for the county council, whereas in the past people in the towns had a vote for the town council and the county council. So, in a sense, all voters were not equal, now they are,” John commented.

The more parochial nature of local elections adds something to the excitement on the day of the count, John believes.

“There tends to be a great interest from the public for the local elections. A candidate might be a neighbour, or a friend or a relative of yours. People connect much more with the local authority than the European Parliament.” 

He said he enjoys the arduous process and ensuring that it is carried out correctly.

“One likes to see that it’s done right because ultimately it’s the people who decide who governs and who controls each local authority. That’s one of the most important rights that every citizen has. You see what happens in other countries where people are denied the right to vote that we just take for granted.”