A former Seanad election candidate wants a full recount of the recent agricultural panel vote in the interest of fairness and transparency, the High Court has heard.
Cllr Angela Feeney, a member of the Labour Party’s central council and former head of Technological University Dublin’s school of languages, law and social sciences, has brought a High Court petition challenging the conduct of vote counting for the agricultural panel.
Cllr Feeney, a councillor in Kildare, wants January’s election result overturned and a recount ordered.
She was eliminated on the 23rd count by a margin of .116, or one-ninth, of a ballot, missing out on the final seat to Fine Gael’s Maria Byrne.
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Each valid Seanad ballot paper is deemed to have a value of 1,000 votes. The total valid poll for the 11-seat agricultural panel was 95,667 votes.
Cllr Feeney’s case claims there should have been a full recount of the ballots, rather than simply a repeat of the 23rd count. She says her request for a full recount was denied by the returning officer.
On Tuesday, giving evidence at the hearing into her action, Cllr Feeney said she was asking the court to grant the recount in the interest of fairness and transparency. She added that the “bigger issue” in the case is transparency and public faith in the electoral system.
Cllr Feeney said she was “surprised” when counting at the count centre began at such a distance that candidates and their teams had no proper sight of the process. Counting continued at a distance of about 7ft away and did not lend itself to “proper oversight” of the process, as one might expect at local or Dáil election count centres, she said.
Cross-examined by Catherine Donnelly, senior counsel for the returning officer, Cllr Feeney agreed other candidates vying for a seat on the agricultural panel were eliminated by similarly slim margins, less than the value of one ballot paper.
Cllr Feeney said because she was last to be eliminated, she had the potential to be elected. None of the other candidates missed out by virtue of a margin as fine as hers, she said.
Cllr Feeney agreed that her side had not identified any particular error in the count process. She said she believed the error was not allowing the full recount and the lack of transparency.
Ms Donnelly put to Cllr Feeney that the count was visible to candidates. The councillor said the visibility was not adequate.
Asked why she did not raise with the returning officer concerns around transparency when she first arrived at the count centre, Cllr Feeney said it did not seem she and her team had an opportunity to raise such concerns.
Conor Power, senior barrister for Ms Feeney, said the returning officer had discretion in granting a full recount but a number of factors must be considered in exercising that discretion.
In Cllr Feeney’s case, those factors included the narrow margin of difference between her and the next candidate, the very small margin of difference on a number of previous counts and the possibility of human error during the count, Mr Power said.
The case continues before Mr Justice Mícheál O’Higgins.
