Scanned, handwritten PDFs spread across multiple institutions is not acceptable in 2024 and does not enable accountability
Professional outdoor advertising, including things such as billboard and bus ads, cost even more; Fine Gael headquarters spent about €93,000 on these during the European elections. Photograph: Enda O'Dowddebate, mostly in the form of promises of bumper giveaways in the year ahead. We hear less about money being spent in the campaign by parties and candidates. This is at least in part because when it comes to political finance, following the money in Ireland is functionally impossible.
But campaigning isn’t free and even the most bootstrapped campaign will incur costs. Election posters cost about €8 each, plus a few euro more if you want to pay to have them hung. This adds up.headquarters spent about €93,000 on these during the Europeans. Then there are the leaflets, which need to be designed and printed, opinion polls, transportation, digital ads, newspaper ads, room hire and, for some, advisers or consultants.
But for transparency to work, data has to be findable, usable, timely and complete. Irish political finance data is none of that. For the local and European elections, spending data is spread across 32 different institutions; the Standards In Public Office Commission and the local authorities. It is unclear if all of these publish their returns online.
Here, somewhat ironically, digital political ads have leapfrogged from being the most clandestine form of political campaign expenditure to the most transparent. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was so destabilising to trust in the Brexit and first Trump votes that tech companies were forced to introduce real-time libraries of political ads, with live data during the campaign of what parties and candidates are spending.
It also means that we need to extend the vendor-side transparency to other types of campaigning expenditure. If Meta can publish data on the ad space that it sells to candidates, why can’t the likes of JCDecaux or VistaPrint? Or, for that matter, newspapers?
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