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.