Call to mark election voters with ink

ENVIRONMENT Minister Dick Roche last night suggested a novel way to beat the threat of mass fraud at the next election — indelible ink which stays on voters fingers for five days.

Mr Roche said he had observed the “low-tech” identification system in operation in Nicaragua and believed in could work here.

With the electoral register out by between 300,000 and 800,000 voters, the minister said there was no “silver bullet” solution, but the tell-tale ink marks could be seen as a “badge of democracy” by electors.

The Third World solution was one of a raft of options put forward by Mr Roche as he faced a grilling from the Oireachtas Environment Committee over how he plans to get the register in order before the next general election.

Even Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has admitted fraud is rife in his own Dublin constituency where, he said, some four-bedroom houses are listed as having 80 eligible voters.

Mr Roche pledged to pump an extra €6 million into trying to update the register this year.

He said that census enumerators would be sent out again from this month to track voters to their correct address. Mr Roche indicated homes would be visited twice and then written to twice to ensure the correct names were recorded, if no response was forthcoming all names at that address would be deleted from the register.

The minister said the indelible ink option had been effective in elections he observed in Central America.

“It’s very low-tech but you won’t be able to vote twice,” he told the committee. Mr Roche suggested a more hi-tech solution could be the electronic finger print monitors used at airports.

Labour TD Eamon Gilmore criticised the “11th hour” nature of the initiative and called for non-confidential information to be taken from the recently completed census forms and given to local authorities so they could check it against the register.

The minister ruled this out as an option as people had not been informed of such a move prior to filling out their forms.

Green TD Ciarán Cuffe accused Mr Roche of “using a blunderbuss” to try and sort out the problem.

His suggestion of using PPS numbers was ruled unworkable by the minister as they were not linked to home addresses and included hundreds of thousands of foreign workers not eligible to vote in Dáil elections.