Free advice to Seanad Candidates (NUI/TCD)

So you’ve gotten yourself nominated for the Seanad for either the NUI or TCD panels. Good for you!

Now the bad news. You won’t get much of a chance to build your profile during the campaign itself. The media don’t much care and even 10 minutes of national radio won’t get you much attention.

For those at the younger end of the spectrum they should note that most of those registered and by extrapolation voting are much older than people seem to think they should be. Sure there’s been an enormous increase in graduate numbers of the last 20 years but unfortunately up to 90% of many of those years aren’t registered at all. Even those that are will be more likely to have their parents address instead of their current address.

Pay for the electronic copy of Seanad register and look at who is registered on your local area, and go door to door! You’d be amazed at how effective it can be.

Use a search service that generates a map based on xls imports and you’re then going to be able to plan a nice walking route. Make sure it’s one that doesn‘t necessarily retain the data though, you don’t want to breach any data protection regulations.

Don’t go mad with glossy A4 leaflets or paying for mail outs to people, you’re not going to see the return on it that you’d be expecting.

Be aware that the penetration of the litir um thoghchán isn’t 100% effective, in some/many instances people will get it after the votes have been sent back and even in some cases after the deadline for sending the votes in has passed.

You might tell yourself and some voters may even tell you that they’ll research each of the candidates and weigh up all the pros and cons, the ins and outs before making their decision. However 90% won’t remotely do that. They will either not have the time or the inclination to invest 5 minutes per candidates, equating to over 3 hours of research, before deciding how to vote.

The process that most of the voters appear to use, especially when confronted by a large ballot paper is to scan down and perhaps across it if a butterfly ballot is used, and see which names they recognise. From those 5/8 names, they’ll make their decisions on who gets their first votes. After that it’s going to be pretty random.

The biggest factor you need to deal with before they look at the ballot at all is name recognition, if they’ve heard of you before now and have formed an opinion then you’re half way to getting elected. And here’s the rub even if 80% of people the electorate have a strongly negative perception while 5% think you’re the best thing since sliced bread, while the remaining 15% are middling indifferent, you could well get elected. Why? Cos the turnout is usually 35% of so, 35% of 103,000 is about 36,000 and that gives a quota of 9,000. However the vote is going to be heavily fractured so someone with 5% true believers amongst that 103,000 on the register is starting the first count on 5,150 votes.

The vote you’ll get compared to someone else is no reflection on who you are as a person compared to anyone else. Just because they got 900 votes compared to your 450 doesn’t mean they’re twice as capable as you or twice as kind or humane. Keep that in mind when consider the person on 225 votes too!

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