Teams of experienced counters from Cork’s City and County Halls have been drafted in to speed up the recount in Ireland South.
It had been expected that the recount, which had been ordered after just 326 votes separated Green party senator Grace O’Sullivan from Sinn Féin’s Liadh Ní Riada, would take around 28 working days at a cost of €1m.
The recount in the 12-county constituency began this morning in Nemo Rangers GAA club but it is now expected that the painstaking process of checking every single vote again will be much quicker than expected.
Returning officer Martin Harvey has recruited between 130 and 140 counters and 20 top table supervisors who have experience in the proportional representation (PR) system.
He said these staff have been drafted in from both County Hall and City Hall.
Explaining the process, Mr Harvey said: “At the moment each of the counters has 1,000 votes in front of them, the bands of those 1,000 keeping them together have been cut and each counter is now counting those individually to make sure that the vote credited to the candidate is correct.”
Counters are firstly going through the papers of Ms Ní Riada and Ms O’Sullivan and this is expected to take much of the day.
“It is going quite well now, we have a good team around us and hopefully we would finalise that later this evening,” said Mr Harvey.
“We go though each and every one of the papers slowly and surely, then make sure the band of 50 is correct, that it tots 50 and then we make sure we have 20 bands of 50 to make up the 1,000 [in each bundle].”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Sean O’Rourke show, he added that a yellow sticker will be put on each ballot that requires further analysis and they will be reviewed.
Mr Harvey said Ms Ní Riada, who has called the recount, does have the right to call it off at any stage.
