What issues do you want local elections candidates to talk about?

The local elections are coming up in June, we’ve been thinking about how to cover them, and we have a plan. But we need a little help from you.

We cover Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council and there are basically two sides to these local authorities: the council officials and staff; and the elected local councillors, who serve for five-year terms.

All the seats on both councils are going to be up for grabs in the local election in a few months: that’s 63 seats in Dublin city and 40 in Fingal.

If you live in either area, and you are over 18, you are probably eligible to vote on who you want to be your local councillor, whether you are an Irish citizen or not.

We want to cover these elections in a way that is useful for you if you are trying to decide who to vote for.

By finding out what issues you care about, asking candidates to say how they’d address these issues, and then building an online guide where you can see who’s running for council in your area, and what they say about these issues.

To help us do this, we’d be grateful if you’d answer this very short little questionnaire, and persuade as many other people in your area as you can to do the same.

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We stole this idea

This is not the first time we’ve done a local election voter’s guide. We did it the last time around, in 2019, too – though just for Dublin City Council that time.

Leading into that election we spent a while thinking about how best to cover elections.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has written about how to cover elections, and some of what he’s said really resonated with us.

“A very weird thing about horse race or ‘game’ coverage is that it doesn’t answer to any identifiable need of the voter,” Rosen has written. “Should I vote for the candidate with the best strategy for capturing my vote? Do I walk into the voting booth clutching a list of who’s ahead in the polls?”

Rather than trying to predict which candidate or party is going to win an election, and get behind the scenes on their internal debates and strategies for getting votes, campaign coverage should instead focus on getting candidates to talk about the issues voters want them to address.

Then voters can enter the voting booth clutching a list of candidates whose views they agree with on how to address issues they care about.

Rosen called this the “citizens’ agenda” approach, but since it’s not just Irish citizens who can vote in local elections, we’ll be calling this list of issues we build and put to candidates the “voters’ agenda”.

We think this approach to building a voter guide worked pretty well last time, and we hope it’ll be useful to voters this time around as well.

Last time there were about 130 candidates running for Dublin City Council, and we got 105 of them to say what they’d do about 10 issues people told us they wanted to hear about.

The home page of our voters’ guide got nearly 38,000 visits in May, the month of the 2019 election – plus, the individual candidate pages also each got 200 to 1,500 visits, with visitors spending around a minute on these pages.

We hope people will find it useful again this time around.