by James Byrne, Aoibhean Cuffe & Lorcan McKenna

February 2016

On Tuesday 23^rd February we started a General Election within our school to learn how elections work. We got students from 1^st to 6^th class to vote for the candidates from Kildare North. We set up a polling station in Room 8 and we made ballot papers with all the candidates from Kildare North on it.

 

We had 7 groups, each designated to one class. 4^th-6^th came down to vote during lunchtime on Tuesday. On Wednesday, 1^st– 3^rd came down to vote.

 

On Thursday  we counted all of the votes and checked if there were any spoiled votes and made sure there was a stamp on all of the ballot papers. The electorate was 191, the turnout was 161 with 7 spoilt and 154 valid votes. That meant the quota was 31.

On the first count Frank O’Rourke got 57 votes and was elected. Gerard Dunne, Aisling Merriman, Elizabeth O’Sullivan and Brendan Young were all knocked out in the first count. On the second count Reada Cronin got knocked out. On the third count, Bernard Durkan and Shane Fitzgerald got knocked out. On the fourth count Emmet Stagg got elected with 31 votes. On the fifth count, Anthony Lawlor got elected with 32 votes. In the sixth and last count James Lawless got elected with 26 votes and Catherine Murphy was knocked out with 23 votes.

We made a poster to explain the count and told all the classes what had happened. We learned a lot about how elections worked and everyone enjoyed the voting and counting.