It is a strange artefact of Irish law that a country smaller in terms of both population and size than all but a handful of US states has 31 separate electoral registers rather than a single centralised list of voters.
This bizarre arrangement – where county councils maintain the register for their areas – is the reason why, had I really felt like it, this writer could almost certainly have voted several times in the most recent general election. A polling card for me arrived to my childhood home, for example, from where I voted for the first time in 2002, and from which I departed permanently in 2004. I assume therefore that polling cards also arrived to old addresses of mine in Dublin, and Galway.
Because the registers are independently held by the councils, detecting the voter fraud (had I committed it) would require work: An investigating officer would have to go and check that John McGuirk voted in the Tullycorbett ward in Cavan-Monaghan, and then check independently that John McGuirk also voted in the Killoscully Ward in Tipperary North. He would then have to go and do the investigative work necessary to establish that these two Johns McGuirk were in fact the same person. Further, he would have to prove that I had not been impersonated and that I actually had been sad enough to spend election day traversing the country just to vote twice in two separate constituencies – neither of which has ever been decided by a single vote.
Nevertheless, by my count it is possible that “John McGuirk” is registered to vote perhaps six times on various Irish electoral registers at various historic addresses. So, when you hear that “turnout is low”, consider the fact that I, for one, only voted one time last November (for all the good that it did me, or the candidate who got my first preference). The turnout rate for John McGuirk on the Irish electoral register was quite possibly a very poor 16.66%, which likely dragged overall turnout down a bit.
That this problem is widespread is neither surprising nor shocking. What it remains, however, is scandalous:
“The (electoral) commission could not offer data for the number of names on the registers that should not be there.
Its chief executive Art O’Leary said he has seen estimates of between 200,000 and 500,000 but: “It is not possible to say right now from the data that we have.”
He added: “We’ll have a better idea after we have the audit. It is safe to say this figure is in the hundreds of thousands.”
However, asked by reporters if there was anything to suggest elections have been compromised as a result, Mr Carey said there was: “No evidence to suggest that.”
That last bit in bold is, of course, mystifying in its casualness. Of course there is no evidence that elections have been impacted by the flaws in the register because to find out if fraud occurred in a substantial way would require the state to carry out the investigation I outlined above, potentially hundreds of thousands of times. Our electoral system is such a byzantine mess that organising widespread voter fraud (through double-or-triple registration of the same voters) would be challenging, but not nearly so challenging as detecting it.
The safest evidence that we have, in fact, against the idea that the electoral register has resulted in fraud or malfeasance in elections is declining turnout. The more names we have added, the lower turnout has (in broad terms) gone. That is consistent with lots of redundant registrations, rather than lots of fraudulent ones. Put it this way: I would be much more worried about widespread voter fraud had the turnout at last year’s election suddenly risen to 75 or 80%.
Regardless, the fact that the register has ended up in this point is a stunning tribute to Irish administrative incompetence: Running a safe and secure and easily understood electoral system should not be beyond the basic abilities of a modern state. The state collects birth and death information as a matter of course. Certificates are issued in respect of both: It should not be difficult for the information regarding births, deaths, PPS numbers and other identifying data to be shared with a central authority managing the electoral register. Nor would it be difficult in the case of changes of address to ensure that all such requests must be accompanied by a declaration of any previous voter registration, which is automatically deleted. This is not a multi-billion euro task.
As things stand, the very best we can hope for is that widespread fraud has not taken place. It is very unlikely, in fairness, that it has. But that is not down to any concerted or even basic effort by the state to protect the integrity of the electoral system.
It is to the credit of the Electoral Commission that these issues might finally now be addressed. It should be an embarrassment to the country – and those running it – that it has taken this long.