The Standards in Public Office Commission published the 2011 General Election expenses from all registered political parties and candidates last month. It is interesting to see how the war chests are spent and how many companies earn from elections being held.

Election Mall (based in the USA) were paid €149,435 by Fine Gael for publicity and advertising services.  In addition they spent €98,616 on Google and Facebook advertising. (Fine Gael spent €3,120,238 in total on the election.)

If you want to see what this amount of money gets you, Election Mall have made a video showing what they did! Remember the twolicy, the game, … the MSN advertising? (No i didn’t get the latter either).

Election Mall and Fine Gael are of course now no longer working together after the company refused to co-operate with a Data Protection Commission investigation into the hacking of the new website last January. The party were said to be seeking an Irish company to handle things online for them- any news on who has the gig now?

Ravi Singh continues to work on elections across the world and talk about himself and Obama even though he was never involved.  Election Mall have an office which is their European HQ in a temporary office suite in Dublin 2.

Fianna Fáil paid over €12,000 to their guru’s, Blue State Digital, in General Election 2011.  Have a look through the rest of the expense reports to see who else was paid for Democracy 2.0 in Election 2011.