New guidelines to solve electoral register ‘mess’

THE Government has issued new guidelines to local authorities in a bid to solve problems with the electoral register, which Environment Minister Dick Roche has already conceded is in an “appalling mess”.

There are three million names on the register, even though only 2.7 million people are eligible to vote. Earlier this year, Mr Roche blamed the local authorities, which are responsible for maintaining the register in their respective areas, for allowing this situation to develop. Some local authorities had been careless, he said.

The 300,000 ‘ghost voters’ are a mixture of people whose names have been registered twice, possibly because they moved home; those who have died but not been removed from the register; and people who have purposely sought to carry out registration fraud.

Officials from Mr Roche’s department told the Oireachtas Committee on Local Government yesterday that new ‘best practice’ guidance had been issued to the local authorities.

“It’s generally acknowledged that the task of compiling the register has become more difficult over the years,” said the department’s Mark Coughlan.

“Factors such as rapid population growth, expansion of urban areas, development in rural areas, and increased personal mobility all present new challenges for registration authorities in preparing and maintaining the register,” he said.

The guidance, he said, would seek to address this by providing “greater clarity on the steps to be taken in preparing, publishing and updating the register”.

Mr Coughlan said there were both pros and cons with two of the proposals to improve the reliability of the register.

One proposal is that a single national agency be established to maintain the register.

“(The proposal) would seem on the face of it to serve the particular purpose of focus on the register,” Mr Coughlan said.

“(But) some might see a tendency to try to create agencies to solve every problem, and there are also issues of accountability.”

A second proposal is that local authorities cross-check the names on their registers by using individuals social security, or PPS, numbers.

But Mr Roche himself has already said this would raise problems in relation to data protection laws.