ELECTION DAY COUNTDOWN
34 SEATS, 64 LOCAL CANDIDATES (SO FAR), 23 EUROPEAN CONTENDERS, ONE REFERENDUM, 192POLLING STATIONS AND 8 SEPARATE COUNTS: WEXFORD ELECTION DAY 2019 IS A DREAM FOR THE STATISTICIANS AND A LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE FOR THOSE CHARGED WITH MAKING IT ALL HAPPEN...
AS POLLING day in the local government and European elections and the Regulation of Divorce Referendum set for Friday, May 24, draws closer, the candidates are busy wearing out shoe leather and Wexford County Registrar Marie Garahy and her staff are busy preparing for the mammoth task of sorting and counting three papers from every voter casting a ballot at 192 polling stations across the county.
As of now, 115,228 people in County Wexford are entitled to vote in the elections, with that figure expected to rise following the publication of a supplementary register of late-comers on May 7.
A total of 64 candidates, including 17 women, have so far declared their intention to stand in the local elections with 34 seats available in six electoral districts in the county while 23 candidates have declared in the European elections in Ireland South, including Fianna Fail man
Cllr Malcolm Byrne of Gorey, and Deputy Mick Wallace.
Nominations will be accepted at County Hall from 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 27 and will close on Saturday, May 4 at 12 noon with nominations having to be presented in person.
In the Regulation of Divorce Referendum, people are being asked to vote on a proposal to reduce the period of time that couples should be separated before filing for divorce from four years to two years.
Polling stations will open at 7 a.m. on Friday, May 24 and will remain open throughout the day until 10 p.m. at night.
The following day, approximately 100 counting staff will gather in The Street Space in County Hall in Carricklawn on Saturday, May 25 for the counting and sorting of the ballot papers into local election, European election and Referendum bundles, with the centre open to the
public from 9 a.m.
That task is expected to take until late afternoon on Saturday to complete, at which point, the local election papers will be transferred, under supervised escort, to a count centre at St. Joseph’s Community Centre in Wexford town, for the start of the sorting and counting process by Local Elections Returning Officer, Pat Collins.
The European ballot papers will be transported under army escort to the Count Centre for Ireland South in Cork.
The Referendum papers will remain in the County Hall in Carricklawn, to be counted under the supervision of the County Registrar and her team.
After the three sets of ballot papers are sorted and separated, some of the count staff in County Hall will move to the St. Joseph’s count centre where six separate simultaneous local election counts will take place, one per electoral area - Wexford, Rosslare, Gorey, Enniscorthy, Kilmuckridge and New Ross.