Welfare & equality candidate Nathan Harrington has been issued a strike by the Electoral Commission (EC).
According to the EC, the strike was issued due to a post made on Harrington’s campaign Instagram account in which he encouraged students to reach out to him on his personal account.
This violates Section 4.5.4(e) of the sabbatical election regulations, which states: “Campaign teams are not permitted to use pre-existing social media pages.”
Harrington told Trinity News that he did not know that promoting his personal Instagram account constituted a campaign violation.
“I thought it’d be fine as long as I didn’t use [my personal account] but I guess inviting people to message me there counts as actually message people from it”.
As a class B violation, Harrington’s campaign has received 50 points from the EC. A campaign may receive 100 points worth of sanctions before being disqualified from their race and struck from the electoral ballot.
His campaign team was also banned from campaigning for five hours today. The ban on campaigning took place between 10AM and 3PM today.
Harrington returned to online campaigning 3 minutes after the ban was lifted.
This is the second strike issued by the EC this election season. Fellow welfare & equality candidate Hamza Bana had previously been issued a strike for having failed “to declare his absence from the Election Briefing hosted by the Electoral Commission”, which took place immediately after candidates were announced last month.
Bana was prohibited from campaigning for two hours.
