Local councils to blame for the poor state of electoral register

THE state of our electoral register is in the first instance a serious indictment of local government administration in this country.

Many of our local authorities have proved singularly incompetent at doing what should be a relatively straightforward task — finding out who lives in each house or apartment in their area and registering them, and only them, to vote.

While the extent of the problem has been overstated in the recently published ad hoc surveys, the fact that there are large discrepancies in our electoral role is now beyond dispute. For that failure local government officials must take the primary responsibility.

Excuses like the fact that the nature of our population has changed and that there is now greater and more frequent geographic mobility do not stand up. All they do is reveal the extent to which some parts of our local government system have failed to adapt to the reality of modern demographic and social trends.

One of the problems of the adversarial nature of our politics, and of the way the media covers it, is that in order to get publicity for an issue, the opposition parties need to attack the Government over it. Somewhat understandably therefore, the main focus of the opposition attack about the sorry state of our electoral register is focused on the Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Dick Roche.

However, what the opposition and indeed some Government politicians have failed to accept is that the real culprits of this incompetence are the local authorities. I am not saying that the minister, as the person ultimately responsible for electoral matters and franchise in this country, shouldn’t be held to account.

Dick Roche will rightly be held responsible if the issue that has now been highlighted is not resolved before next year’s election. However, he cannot be held personally responsible for the fact that the local authorities haven’t done their job right to date.

In the Dáil last week, Labour’s spokesman Eamon Gilmore moved a private member’s bill on the topic. Labour deserves credit for giving parliamentary time to the issue, but because they are instinctively opposed to taking away any task from the local authorities, even this purely administrative one, they have come up with a flawed solution. The Labour proposal, at least for the short term, was to establish an electoral registration commissioner who would assist, advise and coordinate the collating of the register by the local authorities.

It fell to two Government backbench speakers during the debate to lay the blame squarely where it lies. The PDs’ Fiona O’Malley described the local authorities as indifferent to the inaccuracy of the registers they produce and argued that a single national system should be put in place instead.

Fianna Fáil’s Seán Fleming was even blunter in his language. He described the electoral register as a disgrace and an outrage. He pointed out that local authorities had failed miserably at the job, have no interest in doing it, and no inclination to do anything about the problem now identified.

Mr Fleming went on to hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that if the local authorities were the problem, they cannot be the solution — even in the short term — as both Dick Roche and Eamon Gilmore have suggested.

Seán Fleming argued that to ask the local authorities now to redouble their efforts, make new proposals or provide extra funding for them to revamp their register, as the minister was proposing, would be a waste of time. Since they have had “all the chances in the world to get it right” and had got it so wrong, he concluded the job should be taken away from them.

The opposition are being selective in holding Dick Roche only to account for this mess. If they were really committed to solving this problem, then the opposition parties would follow up on their private members’ debate last week by putting the state of the electoral register on the agenda of the next meeting of every county or city council in the country.

Better still, they should haul the county or city manager, together with his or her relevant officials, before the council and demand to know the current state of the register in their local authority area and ask them to outline what particular steps are now going to be taken by the local officials to solve the problem before the election.

If those directly responsible for the task cannot be held to political account in the councils, then why leave it at local government level?

The best idea which has emerged during all the recent controversy is the suggestion that the census enumerators should be sent back into the field in the autumn to compile and check the register.

Because of the legal and time restraints, the information collated by these enumerators could be handed over to the local authorities which could still be responsible for publishing the register.

EACH of the 4,400 enumerators employed for the census was responsible for about 340 residences. They have gained invaluable experience and a detailed knowledge of their assigned area.

There were suggestions in news reports last week that although initially enthusiastic about the idea, Mr Roche had run into bureaucratic obstacles, local government inertia and suggestions that the public sector union would have problems with the employment of these part-timers to do the electoral register job.

The minister should cast aside these bureaucratic and turf war considerations and ensure instead that the job is done, and done properly.

The best way to ensure this once-off re-collating and check of the register is done effectively is to have it coordinated nationally by the Central Statistics Office. Leaving it to the local authorities again would result in it being as patchy as the current system — it would work in well organised local authorities, but the collation work would continue to be weak in those areas where the local authorities are disorganised.

Even efforts by the Office of Local Government Management to co-ordinate a blitz will find it hard to overcome those gaps. Indeed, the fact that this national office, which advises and assists local management, has now got involved is in itself a recognition that the task cannot safely be left to individual councils.

The long-term solution is a more comprehensive reform of the way we run our elections. Many politicians, including Eamon Gilmore and several Government ministers, have publicly voiced support for setting up an elections commission which would have the full-time job of collating the register, administering our elections, and overseeing compliance with spending and ethics legislation.

This would not be the creation of a new quango, as some have suggested, because it could also subsume many of the responsibilities of the Standards in Public Office Commission, the franchise section of the Department of Environment and perhaps also the ad hoc referenda and electoral boundary commissions.

Concerns about the need for an elections commission to be accountable to the political system for its work could be addressed by subjecting it to the oversight of an Oireachtas committee.

Many politicians and commentators too often parrot a simplistic notion that local government is good and national government is bad. Too many of them are also too quick to blame national government for the failings of local authorities.

Compiling the electoral register is a task almost uniquely suited to national rather than local administration, especially in an era when people increasingly move house across county and city boundaries. The sooner this task is taken off those who have shown they can’t do the job, the better.