“My question for the politicians here is: do they think it’s acceptable that a young person like me, who’s excited to be voting for the first time, can’t find a party that’s worth voting for?” That was a question from James, an 18-year-old in the audience of the BBC’s ‘Good Friday Agreement Generation’. Whether you’re able to vote for the first time, or whether you’ve been voting for decades, I suspect that James’s question resonates with many people of all generations. We have no shortage of political parties in Northern Ireland, but we do have a huge shortage of enthusiasm towards politics. Elections are all about choices, but more choice doesn’t necessarily mean more enthusiasm.

Just look across the Atlantic. An unprecedented seventeen candidates put themselves forward for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Eventually the contest was whittled down to an effective two-way race between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican member of the US Congress for South Carolina, was asked by a reporter in January which of the two candidates he would prefer to be his party’s nominee for the presidency. “It’s like being shot or poisoned,” he answered. “What does it really matter?”

Incidentally, Senator Graham has since (reluctantly) endorsed Ted Cruz. Ultimately deeming Cruz to be the lesser of two evils, Graham explained his reasoning on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: “Well, Donald is like being shot in the head. You might find an antidote to poisoning.” He went on, “He was my fifteenth choice. What can I say?”

This colourful illustration aside, it underscores the unfortunate reality behind many of the choices we face: what happens if we don’t really like anything on the menu? On the one hand, the answer is simple. Don’t order anything. Go somewhere else. Take a stand. Vote with your feet. On the other hand, the choice might not be so straightforward. Nowhere else is open, this place seems to be the best there is, or you’re stuck on a plane for the next eight hours. In that case, the least bad option suddenly becomes more appealing than nothing at all.

To risk stating the obvious, however, choosing which party to vote for in an election to Northern Ireland Assembly is not the same as choosing something off a menu. For all the attention that politics gets in Northern Ireland, surprisingly little is paid to our electoral system. Most people understand that our electoral system based on a proportional method, but the significance of its preferential quality is often overlooked. That is, we understand that each party ends up with a number of seats that broadly reflects the number of votes it received. Much harder to understand is what it means to cast different types of vote: the difference between a first preference, second preference, third preference, and so on.

This may sound pedantic, but the electoral system is one of the few things that could make this otherwise unremarkable election rather interesting. Why? In short, it gives voters much more individual freedom than parties would like them to have. That’s why you hear a lot about parties’ attempts at ‘vote management’. If a party is fielding three candidates in your constituency, it will ask you to vote in a particular order to maximize its chances of getting all three of its candidates elected. If you vote in a different order, say by giving a different party your second and third preferences, you undermine the party’s attempts at vote management.

It’s not all as arcane as you might think. In the last Assembly election, less than one third of MLAs were elected on first preferences alone. The remaining two thirds were elected thanks to lower preferences. That doesn’t make one MLA superior to another. It’s exactly how the system is supposed to work. Parties do well from this system when their voters are loyal enough to ‘obey’ their vote management instructions; they do badly when voters behave more independently.

So what does all of this mean in practice? It means that if you’re feeling pretty unenthusiastic about voting on Thursday, the following reasons might not be good enough for staying at home:

 

“There’s no point in voting. There’s not much difference between any of the parties.” It depends on how much or how little difference you really think there is between the parties seeking your vote. If you really can’t see any difference between any of the parties, then you might have a point. But if, in reality, you do prefer one party over another then that means there is some sort of a difference between them. The voting system means that you don’t just have to choose one party; you can vote for as few or as many as you like in order of your preference. The School of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast has launched an app that allows you to see how closely you match with different parties on a range of different policy areas. You can take the test by clicking here. Remember, the app doesn’t tell you how you should vote, but it might just help you to identify differences and similarities between where different parties stand and where you stand.

 

“Politicians are all the same.” Even if you can’t tell that much difference between the different parties, perhaps there is an individual politician who you like or trust more than others. In this case, it might be worth voting for a candidate as an individual, not simply as a member of a party. Most parties have their mavericks. Our electoral system means that you don’t have to follow a party’s instructions on how to vote. You get to pick and choose which individual candidates get which of your preferences. Trying to learn more about individual candidates takes more effort than just knowing where different parties stand, but it might be worth the effort.

 

“Voting here is all about green and orange tribalism. I don’t want to be part of that.” It is true that in virtually every election to date in Northern Ireland, voting behaviour is strongly associated with ethno-national identity, and it doesn’t look as if this election will be any different. Being able to award different preferences to different candidates does, however, help to break down the underlying tribalism behind Northern Ireland politics. Under a preferential voting system, you don’t have to pick one side over another; you can use your preferences to vote across the divide. Plus, there are a number of parties that openly reject traditional orange versus green politics.

 

“I support one of the smaller parties, so my vote is hardly going to make a difference.” That’s rarely true. In the worst case scenario, your candidate will come last. Even in that case, however, your vote will be transferred to your second preference candidate, then to your third preference, and so on, until all of the available seats have been filled in your constituency. Your first preference vote may not be a winner, but your vote will still help to decide who is elected and who isn’t. In the best case scenario, you might live in a constituency where a smaller party or independent candidate actually has a chance of winning outright. There are more competitive races in this election than you might think. In South Down, John McCallister faces a good chance of being re-elected as an independent. In West Belfast and Foyle, People Before Profit is mounting a credible challenge, and in South Belfast the sixth seat is a genuine toss-up between the five main parties, Clare Bailey of the Greens, and possibly even Ruth Patterson (formerly of the DUP). In these tight races, the order of preferences given to smaller parties and independents will be critical.

 

“The result is already a foregone conclusion.” Polling data doesn’t suggest that the results of this election are going to be dramatically different from the last time around. But things aren’t entirely predictable. In most of Northern Ireland’s eighteen constituencies, four or five of the six seats are relatively safe for various parties. In most constituencies, however, the final one or two seats have the potential to go down to the wire. It all depends on how voters use their lower preferences. If their order of preferences is predictable, the results will be predictable. If voters cast their preferences less predictably, the results will be far less predictable. The electoral system can sound really complicated, but yet it’s really that simple.

 

So there you have it. You might be fed up with politics. You might be fed up with political parties. You might be counting down the days until this election is over. If you’re on that boat, you’ll have to decide whether or not you’ll vote at all. It may not be a case of voting for the parties or candidates you like, but it can be a case of voting for the parties or candidates you prefer. The choice really is yours.