I almost missed the deadline to apply for the Register of Electors for Friday’s election. You can imagine my delight when I found my reminder card in the mail last week. It said that I should vote at the primary school on Lower Baggot Street. <\/p>\n
![\"Polling](\"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/apps\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/pollingplace1.jpg\" "\\"Polling")
With a firm sense of civic duty, I walked the short distance to my polling place on Friday morning. I followed a few of my fellow walking voters down the lane to the rear of the school. So far, it looked quite similar to polling places in Illinois.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if there are state or city regulations prohibiting posters and electioneering close to the polling place; the location was deep on private property, so there wasn’t an opportunity for the parties to hang signs.<\/p>\n
I entered the small gym to find a familiar system: two bored teenagers behind a table labeled with my district’s number, and an older man behind a second table for a different district. The young men were solicitous and quickly found my name on the Supplemental Register. I received one ballot, for the city councillors of Dublin. (Alas, only citizens of the EU could vote for Ireland’s Members of the European Parliament.)<\/p>\n
Ireland uses proportional representation for almost all elections; techincally, I voted in a single transferable vote<\/a> system. That means that my ballot consisted of a list of all the candidates for the office, and I could number them in my order of preference. On this ballot, each candidate’s box included the candidate’s party’s logo, area of residence, occupation and other professional information — but no face-photo, to my surprise!<\/p>\n I chose to rank my four preferred candidates, numbering them from 1 to 4 and leaving the rest blank. Ireland uses a secret ballot, so I folded my sheet in half and dropped it in an old-fashioned ballot box. The teenagers bade me farewell, and I was done!<\/p>\n Ballot-counting takes a little longer with proportional representation, but not by much in the digital age. The results were final<\/a> in most areas by Saturday afternoon. As expected, the political establishment was thoroughly shaken, including the Dublin City Council<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Polling](\"http:\/\/bakkerbugle.com\/apps\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/pollingplace2.jpg\" "\\"Polling")
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