PoliticsAnalysis

The problem with State’s Electoral Register: Easy to get on, hard to get off

Many more names on register than legitimate voters

A woman drops her vote into the ballot box during the vote on the European Union's fiscal treaty referendum at a Polling Station in Dublin, Ireland, on Thursday, May 31, 2012. The Irish vote on the European Union's latest treaty today, with polls indicating they will endorse measures designed to ease the euro region's debt crisis. Photographer: Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg
According to a recent academic paper by a political scientist at UCD, the register contains about 305,000 too many entries. Photograph: Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg
Pat Leahy's picture
Pat Leahy
Thu May 01 2025 - 21:27

The state of the Electoral Register has been an open secret for years.

Easy to get on and hard to get off, it is widely understood across the political spectrum by observers and practitioners alike to greatly overstate the actual electorate. That is to say, there are more names on the register than there are actual legitimate voters.

The reasons for this have been understood for years. For a start, there isn’t one Electoral Register – there are 31, as each local authority maintains its own. Some of them are diligent about it and some are not. Some are not good at removing people who die. Some don’t remove people who move address and reregister at their new home. People emigrate and don’t tell the local authority. And so on.

Presenting its report on Thursday, the Electoral Commission, the new body that oversees elections and referendums, noted that 11 councils have more people on their register than the population in their area that is eligible to vote.

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The commission also presented a ranking of the local authorities according to how accurate their register seems. The lowest accuracy indicators were among the local authorities in Sligo, Donegal, Galway county, Cork county, Carlow, Cavan and Mayo.

One of the consequences of this is that it leads to underestimates of the turnout at elections and referendums, because the number of voters who turn up is a smaller percentage of the larger, inaccurate register, than it would be of a smaller, more accurate one.

Estimates of the extent to which the register is wrong have varied. Electoral Commission chief executive Art O’Leary, on Thursday, acknowledged that the number of incorrect entries was probably in the “hundreds of thousands”.

According to a recent academic paper by Thomas Daubler, a political scientist at UCD, the register contains about 305,000 too many entries – equivalent to an overestimation of just under 9 per cent. This would mean the turnout at the last general election was about 65 per cent, Daubler found – a relatively healthy figure, rather than the 59 per cent that was recorded using the (incorrect) current register.

This finding would bear out the expectation that many in politics share, and one senior figure repeated on Thursday, speaking to The Irish Times, that the turnout figure is generally “5 or 6 per cent higher” than officially recorded.

Chatter about legal challenges to election results on the grounds of a bloated register seems far-fetched. There is no credible allegation of electoral fraud, or any sign of evidence suggesting it.

Quotas are set by the number of people who vote, not how many are on the register. And the revision of constituencies is based on actual population as recorded in the census. It’s hard to see where anyone could have a case that the shortcomings of the register affected their electoral chances.

But it is, everyone agrees, high time the register was cleaned up. The commission will conduct a series of these reports and perhaps the publication of the chronic performance of some local authorities will embarrass them into improving their registers. The department has allocated money for the task. It is dull but necessary work.