Confusing presidential ballot

I am lucky enough to have an absentee ballot in US presidential elections. Of course I knew that Clinton and Trump were battling it out for the Democrats and Republicans. I vaguely heard that there were additional candidates for the Libertarian and Green parties, so I was expecting to see 4 names on the ballot, However, when I got my absentee ballot, I was surprised to see 8 candidates that I could vote for, Closer scrutiny revealed that many of the candidates were listed more than once.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate for the Democratic Party, but is also listed separately as the candidate for the Women's Equality Party and the candidate for the Working Families Party (neither of which I heard of before). Likewise Donald Trump is listed as the Republican Party candidate and separately listed as the candidate for the Conservative Party (which I thought was based in the UK).

I had vaguely heard that Gary Johnson was running for the Libertarian candidate, but the ballot also lists him as the candidate for the Independence Party. Poor Jil Stein of the Green Party is the only candidate who has to make do with a single listing on the ballot.

What I am not sure of is if it makes any difference if I tick the box beside the Democratic Party or the box beside the Working Families Party? Could it be that Hillary and/or Donald are splitting their vote or do the counters amalgamate both sets of ticks?

Should Irish people get involved in the US presidential election

In theory Irish people should not care who is president of the United States of America. However, in reality the recent election was the single biggest topic of conversation in Ireland for the last few weeks. This is partly because USA is such a dominant world power, but also because for historical reasons most Irish people have many close relatives living in the USA. In fact many Irish people (including me) have a right to a postal vote as a result of holding American citizenship. So there are active groups campaigning in Ireland for such votes.

Half-Page Ad in Irish Times
publicizing the Paddy Power
early pay-out offer

In the lead up to election day, most professional opinion polls were predicting that the election was too tight to make a definitive prediction. However, on the day before polling, Irish based bookmaker Paddy Power announced that they were so confident that Obama was going to win that they were going to pay out immediately to anyone who had bet on him. This was effectively a very cheap publicity stunt becuase although they claimed it cost them over half a million euro, it ended up costing them nothing because Obama won and the would have had to pay out on all these bets anyway.

I know that the advertisement for this offer which featured the tag line "Sorry Romney - you're not black or cool" was intended to be very much tongue in cheek, but I must say that I found it quite offensive. It was intended to poke fun at Mitt Romney who is not very popular among the Irish public so maybe they felt safe, but the attached picture of president Obama is not very flattering so I suspect that they alienated many of his fans also.

There has been some debate in Irish newspapers recently about whether Ireland should offer some form of voting rights to the Irish Diaspora. This could be quite significant since there are many more Irish citizens (or at least people entitled to Irish citizenship) resident in United States than are resident on the island of Ireland. I wonder how Irish people would feel if a similar advertisement poking fun at Irish politicians was running in American newspapers.