Lincolnshire Voice

City sheriff and returning officer Martin Harvey has explained – Man merely took Ballot Box because he forgot his pencils and paper!!!

Cork Evening Echo Oct 13 2009

THE city sheriff has moved to quell fears about the safety of ballot papers in the Lisbon referendum after a YouTube video showing someone take a ballot box from City Hall was viewed 20,000 times.

The clip shows someone walking out of City Hall with a box of ballot papers on the Friday night of the vote, ahead of counting the next morning. It has received more than 20,000 clicks and is causing plenty of on-line debate.

However, city sheriff and returning officer Martin Harvey has explained that there was nothing untoward going on at the time the video was taken.
He said it was his understanding that the presiding officer in question had arrived at City Hall with the ballot box but had left behind a parcel at the polling station and had, merely returned to get it.

The parcel contains everything used at the polling station for the vote — including any pencils or leftover ballot papers as well as documents used on the day — and must be given into City Hall with the ballot box.

The box was sealed so" there was -no way any. votes could have been tampered with while the polling officer returned to the polling station, Mr Harvey explained.

"The ballot box was never out of his possession until he surrendered it at City Hall," Mr Harvey said.
"The system operated by polling officers up and down the country is tried and tested and complies with the law. There is no question of any votes going missing," he added.

The video, which was uploaded over a week ago, shows a man leaving City Hall with a ballot box in his hand before disappearing from view.

Titled 'Irish Referendum Count at Cork City Hall', the video is labelled as having been recorded at 10.33pm on October 2, the day of the election when the ballot boxes were being delivered from the polling stations for the count. Despite not showing evidence of vote-tampering, it received a massive amount of attention on-line.

• Under Irish law, ballot boxes are required to be delivered by members of the garda (police) to the polling stations at 7:00 am on the date the election takes place.

• This legal requirement applies to ALL polling in Ireland, whether elections or referenda.

• On this occasion, however, the ballot boxes were delivered to the private residences of the polling/Returning Officers, 48 hours prior to the Referendum.

• A number of honest Returning Officers formally objected to this BREACH OF PROCEDURE, and to the concomitant prospective breach of security, let alone of the electoral legislation.

• We understand that such objections were officially dismissed out of hand on the spurious and diversionary grounds that the ballot boxes possessed no commercial value, so it would be in nobody’s commercial interest to steal them.

• The central issue – that since the Irish ballot boxes were delivered 48 hours early they could be ‘stuffed’ with YES votes, as routinely happens in places like the former Soviet Republic of Georgia – was of course not addressed.


& From the uk Column:

There were at least six dimensions to this illegality:

1) The intervention of the European Commission, entailing massive expenditure of money to influence Irish opinion towards a Yes, the running of a web-site and the issuing of statements that sought to counter No-side arguments, and the adocacy of a Yes vote by Commission President Barroso and other Commissioners and their staffs during visits to Ireland. This is unlawful under European law, as the Commission has no function in relation to the ratification of new Treaties, something that is exclusively a matter for the Member States under their own constitutional procedures;

2.) The part funding of the posters and press advertising of most of Ireland’s Yes-side political parties by their sister parties in the European Parliament, even though it is illegal under Irish law to receive donations from sources outside the country in a referendum and even though, under European law, money provided by the European Parliament to cross-national political parties is supposed to be confined to informational-type material and to avoid partisan advocacy;

3) The Irish Government’s unlawful use of public funds in circulating to voters a postcard with details of the so-called “assurances” of the European Council, followed by a brochure some time later containing a tendentious summary of the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, as well as other material – steps that were in breach of the 1995 Irish Supreme Court judgement in McKenna that it is unconstitutional of the Government to use public funds to seek to obtain a particular result in a referendum;

4) The failure of the country’s statutory Referendum Commission to carry out its function under the Referendum Act that established it of explaining to citizens how the proposed constitutional amendment and its text would affect the Irish Constitution. Instead the Commission’s Chairman, Judge Frank Clarke, turned the Commission into an arm of Government propaganda, while the judge indulged himself in various “solo-runs” on radio and in the newspapers, giving several erroneous explanations of provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, even though this was quite beyond his powers under the Act;

5) Huge expenditure of money by private companies such as Intel and Ryanair to advocate a Yes vote, without any statutory limit, in possible breach of Irish company and tax law, and undoubtedly constituting a major democratic abuse.

6) Breaches by the Irish broadcast media of their obligation under the Broadcasting Acts to be fair to all interests concerned in their coverage of issues of public controversy and debate. Newstalk 106, owned by Mr Denis O’Brien, a committed supporter of the Yes side, was quite shameless in its partisanship on its current affairs programmes.