Jude Collins

Friday 4 March 2011

The dregs of the electorate




Now that the dust has begun to settle and the media are left with nothing to report  except Enda Kenny rushing off to Europe to pretend he’s Angela's (with a hard ‘g’)’s bestest friend and Eamon Gilmore rushing off to Athens to pretend he’s a European statesman,  it might be helpful to spend a little time peering at one section of the entrails of the south’s recent election. Or to be more precise, one section of the electorate there. Put another way: let’s have a look at how many truly lazy, stupid people there are in different areas of the country.

You’re probably chuckling “Oh, he’s going to talk about Fianna Fail voters” or maybe “He’s going to give the Blueshirts a kicking”. Not so. I’m talking about the section of the electorate that just about all parties would agree is a lazy, seriously dumb section.

Let’s take an example - the Louth constituency. As most of us know by now, Gerry Adams topped the poll with more than 15,000 votes.  Nice one. At the election, just over 70,000 people voted. Good again. But – and this is the important part , so pay attention – the Louth constituency has 99,530 people on its register.  Which means that some 30% of the electorate were so lazy or so stupid that, on polling day, they thought it was better to sit at home and nod off in front of the telly or grease the cat’s boil or do whatever it is that really lazy, stupid people do on polling day instead of voting.

And of course Louth isn’t an exception. In Dublin Mid-West,  where Mary Lou MacDonald was elected, over 20,000 bone-brained beauties stayed at home scratching themselves. In Wicklow, people are a bit smarter, or rather thre are a few more smart people: the dunderheads there compose less than a quarter of the voting population. It’s still a lot of people – over 24,000 morons. The Wicklow election was a cliff-hanger – remember all those recounts and knife-edge leads?  If even a fifth of the idiots who stayed at home had grunted, rubbed their eyes and gone out and cast their votes, they’d almost certainly have changed the make-up of those elected.

Or take Dublin Mid-West.  One of Sinn Féin’s most impressive candidates, Eoin Ó Broin,  missed taking the last seat by just over 500 votes.  There are over 20,000 bleary-eyed, dumb-ass non-voters in Dublin Mid-West. If one fortieth of those clowns had made the supreme sacrifice of walking to their local polling booth and putting a 1 beside Ó Broin’s name, he’d be a TD today.

You could cheer yourself up, if you wanted, and tell yourself  that things are getting better. They are, sort of. Four years ago in 2007, just 67% of the voters turned out and cast their ballots. This year,  70% helped decide who governs them – that’s a 3% improvement. At the same time, that still leaves just short of a million – can you believe it, a MILLION PEOPLE – for whom the thought of leaving their front room and  voting was just too much. 

What a shower, eh? The big question now is, how many stupid slobs in the north of Ireland are planning to stay at home paring their toenails on 5 May?


8 comments:

  1. While I agree with the theme of your blog, I would point out that the electoral register in the south is ridiculous. I know of one friend who was able to vote in both the north inner city at his new address and in Portmarnock at his old address during the same election with no bother (former PD voter now FG). Worse still another friends father got two polling cards in both his first name and second name. John Smith and Paul Smith= John Paul Smith. If the electoral register was fixed there may have been significant differences in turnout figures.

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  2. I normally find myself nodding enthusiastically in agreement with your blogs Jude, but I find this one to be rather harsh and over the top. While there are certainly many stupid non-voters, there are also plenty stupid people who vote. I just can't agree that someone is necessarily stupid for deciding not to vote.

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  3. Rēgulus is right. There are many good reasons not to vote, not least the choice on offer.

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  4. Sorry to disagree, REgulus and Anonymous. I agree that there are stupid people who vote, of course, thousands of them voted for Fine Gael a week or so ago ( the words 'Christmas' and 'turkeys' come to mind), but that doesn't mean that non-voters aren't uniquely stupid. They leave the field to others to decide how they are governed. That's an adult acting like an infant. And I don't accept that the choice is lousy. It often is, but even then, there's always one party that's marginally less stinking than another, so it'd be desirable the Less Stinking Party get elected, wouldn't it? No, except you're sick or in a deep personal life crisis, I believe you should vote, and if you don't, you deserve all the nasty names we can think of. People fought and even died so we could have a vote. Get off your oversized arse, chaps, and down to the booth...

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  5. Jude,

    so that the less stinking party can legitimize itself by my vote? It can always claim I voted for their stinking policy; that it was not as stinking as the next party because it would only kill 5 million Jews rather than six million; that its torture was more humane then the more stinking lot. There are some times that the moral imperative dictates we don't vote.

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  6. Nice argument, Anon. But it'll still leave you with the blood of a million Jews on your conscience...

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  7. Thank you for leaving that on my conscience Jude!!! But the question still needs to be answered by those who are critical of people who do not come out to vote. You must see the merit in the argument that all these things cannot be reduced to laziness of stupidity. I do vote but can see why so many do not. Some of the non voters fit your description but by no means all.

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  8. Don't you get fined if you don't vote in Australian elections?

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