Electoral register flaws cannot be tolerated

We can be stuck on the wrong thing sometimes. When it comes to the health of our democracy, we have been worrying for years about low voter turnout. The last general election caused particular concern. With turnout in that election estimated at 59.7%, many commentators were shocked that fewer than three in five people actually bothered to vote.

That disappointing figure produced a lot of angst. It generated much discussion. Comparisons with the golden electoral contests of the past were lingered on and laboured over. The share of the vote the parties got in the election was contrasted unfavourably with the actual share of voters – including those who didn’t vote – that supported them. Much was said about how voters were disengaged, and much more about why so many people didn’t bother to vote.

That commentary made it feel like we were reaching a tipping point, looking down the barrel of a day when fewer than half the electorate would vote in an election. Where would the democratic legitimacy of a government be then?

Well, it now turns out that when it comes to turnout we should have been worried about something else altogether. A report last week confirmed that we actually don’t have a clue what the percentage turnout in our last general election was, or in most recent ones for that matter.

That report last week from An Coimisiún Toghcháin, the Electoral Commission, confirmed what many political observers have suspected for years: our electoral register is a mess.

What is even worse is that we have no real idea just how big a mess. The register has names on it of people who have moved home, or are (long) dead or are just no longer around. So if you lived in Dublin or Cork for a while, you could well still be on the register there while also being on the register in Mayo. That would make voting early and often possible if still very much illegal.

It was reported last week that some political scientists estimate that up to 500,000 names are on the register that should not be. All An Coimisiún Toghcháin can say for sure is that the miscount is in the ‘hundreds of thousands’. The extra names on the register could underestimate the actual turnout of actual voters by as much as 5%: for all that is known, it could be higher.

What that means is that when we say turnout in our last election was 59.5%, it means 59.5% of people on a list that includes hundreds of thousands of names that shouldn’t be on the list. It is like saying you invited 100 people to your party, and you were disappointed that only 60 showed up, without realising that a whole pile of people you invited never got the invitation.

There is another problem than turnout. An Coimisiún Toghcháin reports that 11 local authorities – many of them in the west – have more names on their local election register than the entire population of those areas eligible to be on the register.

Such inaccurate registers also make it impossible to know with any certainty how many people are not registered at all. So since we have no idea how many people are on the list inaccurately, there is less urgency to get those who should be on it, onto it.

The central problem with all this is that we don’t have one electoral register. We have 31, individually maintained by each local authority. In most places those registers don’t, as it was put, "talk to one another", meaning duplication is regular, and weeding it out is near impossible.

In fairness, the problem goes back decades, and some local authorities have made good efforts to improve things. Some though have clearly not given it the priority it deserves. A lack of resources is suggested as one of the reasons for this.

Isn’t this all a sorry state of affairs? Now there is some sign of improvement and of change. An Coimisiún Toghcháin has called for a full audit of every electoral register in the country. They want to see a national awareness campaign to encourage the public to correct their own entry on the registers, and they want the appropriate resources dedicated to getting the registers right. Some sort of national standardised system – with appropriate resources applied to achieving that – would surely help.

The Department of Housing and Local Government is compiling a single national register, with the hope that it will be done by autumn 2026. Local authorities are being asked to put more ‘unique identifiers’ into the entries in their individual registers to help this process. It would certainly help if every entry had something like a PPSN number, or an Eircode in it. The PPSN would certainly make weeding out duplicates easier. Sharing data with other agencies – like the Department of Social Protection – would help to confirm who isn’t claiming their pension anymore. That sharing of data might produce some civil liberties concerns, but really, in the modern world, where people share all sorts of data with Google and Meta all the time, we can use modern tools thoughtfully to get this right.

Now of course all this will be difficult: one can only imagine how many ‘Pat Murphy’s’ are on the register nationwide. And of course, there are certainly both a Pat Murphy Snr and a Pat Murphy Jnr in some houses – but those fixing the register have to make a start somewhere and won’t get it always right. And it is also of course appropriate that we should we be slow to take someone off the register unless we are really sure they shouldn’t be on it.

We need to get on with it, as the electoral register is the title deeds of our democracy, and we should treat it with more respect. The list is the source of authority in our land. Our democracy - and thus us - needs that respect.

And one thing this report last week should also do is tone down the handwringing and fixation about turnout as a barometer of our democracy’s health. For the issues which affect that go much deeper than turnout. We should be more worried about the depth of engagement in our democratic process.

What worried me about our last election was not the amount of people who turned out, but the amount of people who turned off. That can’t be fixed by updating a register, but treating the register with more respect is no bad place to start.