End chances of multiple electoral register entries

To have one vote is a privilege, to knowingly have more than one is against the law.

Our electoral register is a statutory instrument and therefore everything possible needs to be done to insure its accuracy.

As all political candidates get a copy of the register for the areas they are canvassing, it is possible that some may have been aware of double entries for years.

Sure, the registers are updated once a year by local authorities’ enumerators, but as the names are not linked with PPS numbers there is no way to check for double entries over all local authority areas.

A lot of younger people have their names entered by parents who make sure they are left on the register for years after they have left home — even though they could be now registered somewhere else where they live.

Enumerators or often attacked by politicians if they are too diligent in their job and remove names from the register for whom they have no verification that person still lives at an address.

When new voters put their names on the supplementary register, they do so with an ID in the presence of a garda — so all would seem water tight. But there is no immediate way of cross checking if the person is already registered in another part of the country.

This is situation is adding to the double entries that plague our electoral registers up and down the country.

At the polling station you can be asked for ID... but if there is no way of cross checking if the person has already voted in another area as that person could present the same ID at another polling station in the country and cast a second vote.

Now while there is no evidence that this is happening, the situation at present is wide open to abuse.

Given that thousands were added to the Registers before the recent referenda, and a moratorium on hiring extra staff by local authorities who deal with registers, there is no doubt that the double or even treble entries could now in their thousands.

It should be “one man, one vote” or “one person, one vote”.

Otherwise we should be dipping our fingers in ink like they do in some third world countries. Surely modern technology can solve this basic element of democracy.

So why is the electoral commission not making a commitment to look into this?

Nuala Nolan

Bowling Green

Galway