Single transferable vote and the Irish general election of 1977

Abstract

In an STV contest, too many names on a ballot paper can confuse voters and compound vote leakage (Mair and Laver, 1975), and we can assume that this did happen in the case of the Coalition. Whereas Fianna Fail nominated 132 candidates, the Coalition total was 172 (FG: 116, Lab: 56), with the result that the latter's vote was more dispersed and less effective than that of Fianna Fail. In one sense this problem is endemic to Coalitions, in that each of the coalescing parties strives to make an individual impact over and above that of the Coalition itself. In so far as this is the case, and in so far as inter-party transferring within a Coalition is likely to be less solid than any intra-party transferring, then we can conclude that a single party in an STV contest will almost always maintain an in-built advantage over a Coalition of equivalent size.