By the time you read this there will be the usual whingeing in the media about our slow election count. But the fact is that we have the best electoral system in the world.
The count is not a trivial affair. Unlike other systems it explains how people voted, who they transferred to and most importantly, whatever their preference, their vote is never wasted unless they want it to be.
The political parties don't like it because it lets power slip from their grasp. In some other electoral systems voters are faced with just one candidate from each party. In others the parties draw up a list so that the voters don't directly choose their MPs. In Ireland each candidate is directly accountable to their constituents. They can always be replaced by those voters, even by someone else from the same party.
The calls to speed up the count should be paid no heed. Why speed up the count? So that the news machine can move on to other stories?
The slow feed of the count in Ireland does a huge service to the public as it helps explain the political system here in a way that draws out the soundbites.
The commentary from politicians is far more candid and revealing in the two day count after the election than in the four week campaign before it. They have nothing to gain from spinning the news.
That said I would be far happier about using gadgetry to speed up the count a wee bit than any relapse to electronic voting and the millions that was wasted on it.
In Scotland they have introduced our STV system for their local authority elections. Scandalised by the idea that their count might last more than a day they brought in counting machines and automatic readers. Then the fun started. They had to make a plea that voters refrain from folding their votes so that the counting staff wouldn't have to unfold them. Some voters took this to be an assault on the secrecy of the ballot in that they would have to walk around the polling station with an open ballot paper.
Then, of course, is the problem of handwriting which I've covered in this column before. No two people in the world writes their numbers in the same way. It like fingerprinting.
The machines were programmed to spit out any ballot which might be inconclusive. And so it did. So each one of these has to be checked by sight.
It all ended up that they might as well have had an entirely manual count.
And I note that the new govener of Florida has ordered that their infamous electronic punching machines be replaced by good old fashioned pen and paper. So hopefully the Irish election count will be with us for some years to come.
But the whole debate about the voting system misses out on the main democratic failing of our system and in really in the rest of the democratic. That is: we don't elect our government. We only elect a parliament.
Right now I'll bet that neither of the coalitions have a majority and the parties are jostling and jockying for position.
I think this is wrong. Cabinet seats should be apportioned according to the wishes of the people. That would be real democracy.