About 420,000 ballot sheets will have to be reprinted following Labour candidate Cyrus Engerer’s withdrawal from the MEP elections a day after he was convicted for revenge porn.
The move will cost the country’s exchequer about €150,000, excluding the cost that will be incurred to urgently import security paper for the reprint.
Mr Engerer announced he was pulling out of the EP election race following a court judgment on Thursday which convicted him of circulating pornographic photos of his ex-boyfriend.
This development left the Electoral Commission in a quandary over how to proceed once the ballots had all been printed.
Article 55 of the General Elections Act precludes a candidate from withdrawing his candidature after the ballot sheets have been printed. “A candidate may, at any time until the ballot papers for the district he is contesting have started to be printed in terms of article 49, withdraw his candidature by giving notice to the Commission to that effect,” it states.
The Commission met with urgency in the afternoon to discuss the way forward but the discussion turned on to another article of the same act, sources said.
Article 49 stipulates that ballots cannot be printed earlier than 13 days prior to the election date (May 24) and not later than 10 days before. The decision to print earlier was taken following consultation with the two main political parties.
A heated debate ensued, sources said, about whether those 13 days started from the election date or the date of the early voting which takes place today week, May 17.
Sources said the argument was made that the early print had shortened the time window within which a candidate could withdraw, and the ballots should not have been printed before May 11 – tomorrow.
The decision was finally taken to reprint the documents.
Contacts started yesterday over the logistics, as importation of the extra security paper needed and the printing has to be concluded by Wednesday, 10 days before the election as prescribed by law. Twenty-five boxes of security paper were used to print the first batch and there were only 12 left in stock.
Sources said it took a full 28 hours at the Government Printing Press to print the 420,000 ballot sheets which will now have to be scrapped. Today, another 16-hour process was due to start to cut single ballot sheets from long strips of printed paper and pack them into batches of 50.