As campaigns gear up in central Dublin, how sound is the voter register?

When Ray McAdam, the Fine Gael councillor and Lord Mayor, moved from Stoneybatter out to Lucan, his vote didn’t move with him. 

He moved in October 2022, he said.

During the local elections in June 2024, he was still registered to vote in Stoneybatter, shows the marked register.

And, for that election, he did, voting in his constituency of the North Inner-City – where he was running as a candidate. He topped the poll on the first count with 11.2 percent of first-preference votes, and was the first to cross the threshold to secure a seat.

By law, voters are supposed to register to vote and cast that vote where they are “ordinarily resident”. But that phrase isn’t defined in electoral law.

It is up to councils to determine how to deal with residency questions if they arise, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council has said. “At any time the Franchise Section have the authority to ask for supporting documentation.”

McAdam said he just forgot to switch his vote over to his new neighbourhood, with the move and just life. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even think about it.”

He didn’t register to vote in Lucan as well – just in the North Inner-City. “I wasn’t registered to vote anywhere else,” he said.

As campaigns for the Dublin Central bye-election sparked by the resignation of Fine Gael TD Paschal Donohoe are gearing up – McAdam reportedly is the favourite to be Fine Gael’s candidate – it isn’t difficult to find inaccurate entries on the area’s electoral register.

For example, Social Democrats Councillor Daniel Ennis and independent Councillor Malachy Steenson, who are both standing in the bye-election, are registered at addresses where they don’t live now – albeit both say they live elsewhere in the same constituency. 

Indeed, that the electoral register includes errors isn’t news. 

Last May, the Electoral Commission released its first report on the accuracy of electoral registers across the country. They’re not in good shape, the report said. 

“The accuracy of the electoral registers is of significant concern,” it said. “An Coimisiún does not believe that any of the registers are of a sufficient level of accuracy.”

The central government, and local councils, have been working since to improve the accuracy of registers – and roll-out a new system.

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said the Department of Housing and Local Government has helped councils with funding for better data quality. The council got €125,000 for this last year. 

The council is also spearheading the roll-out of a shared national register, called the Local Government Electoral Registration System, which would help deal in particular with duplicate entries in different constituencies, they said.

On the whole, councillors and candidates say they don’t have major concerns that errors in the register impact the results right now – but they say it’s something to keep an eye on. 

Their primary concern at the moment is low voter turnout, they say, and ensuring that any integrity measures don’t dampen engagement in elections.

How many voters?

As work on the register has gone on, the numbers registered in Dublin Central have fluctuated.

There were 54,200 registered voters at the start of 2023, said a council spokesperson. That figure rose to 59,400 at the start of 2024, before dropping a little to just over 57,000 at the outset of this year.

An accurate electoral register is one in which there are no false, duplicate or incorrect entries, where all data held for an entry are correct, and where each person is referred to only once, said the Electoral Commissions report. 

Dermot Lacey – who first became a Labour councillor back in 1993, and is one of the longest-serving elected representatives in the city – says he thinks register accuracy has improved in recent years.

“It’s easier to register and all that,” he says. “And it’s easier to take people off.”

Complications tend to stem from the dynamism of the city, he says. The fact that – in Dublin South East and Dublin Central in particular – people, particularly renters in apartments, move home a lot. “There’s an awful lot of Flat Land.”

Daniel Ennis, the Social Democrats councillor for the North Inner-City, who is standing in the Dublin Central bye-election, is registered to vote at the family home where he used to live, the register shows. 

He still lives in that same constituency now, he says – nearby. But he just hasn’t updated his address.

Meanwhile, independent Councillor Malachy Steenson, who also represents the North Inner-City, and is also standing in the bye-election, is registered to vote at an address in that constituency, which he co-owns.

Steenson voted in the local elections in 2024 based on living at that address, shows the marked register. 

Last month, Steenson said he had lived there for a while and two other family members now live at that address. 

But he actually lives at another address that he owns nearby, he said, and which – as with all his properties – is listed on his declaration of interests. “It’s the same constituency. It’s a street away.”

The third property he owns is a house in Co. Louth. But “that’s none of your business”, he said, when asked about that home. “I have a property in Louth, so? What’s the problem with that.”

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner – who is also standing in the Dublin Central bye-election – meanwhile, is registered and voted at the address where she lives, the marked register shows. 

But there are three other names on the register for her address. One is a friend who lives with her, and the other two named people don’t live there, she said –  and aren’t marked as voting in the last election.

They just haven’t been cleaned from the register, she said. Presumably, they were previous tenants or owners, she said. 

Horner thinks, she says, that those former residents or owners have moved abroad – which is a bit tricky for the electoral roll administrators to catch, she says.

Once there is a single national register, councils should be able to flag when somebody is registered to more than one address within the country, she says. 

She knows there are legacy issues, she says. “The idea that you’re getting ballots to your parents’ house, because it has never been updated.” 

But it’s reasonable for people to be only registered to one address, she says. “A singular register, that you can’t be registered in multiple places, is ideal.”

However, in cases where people have moved abroad, the correct response is probably for new residents to send the polling information card back to the local authority, she says. “And that should be encouraged and supported to do.”

She knows, she says, that if the council is considering removing somebody from the register, they go through a lengthy process.

“If they haven’t voted for a certain number of elections at that address, then they’ll send out three letters to see who lives there,” she says.

If nobody makes contact, they’ll remove them, she says. It is admin-heavy, she says, but keeping the register updated always has been.

How serious?

Horner says she is conscious that votes are tight in a bye-election and that it hypothetically would be easy to move votes to a constituency and move them back again, claiming the address of a friend.

A scan of the register shows how frequently there are more people registered to an address than live in the home, she says. “But is it more serious than that? I don’t know.”

“I think [the council] should be paying attention to how many votes are moving into a constituency ahead of a bye-election,” she says.

McAdam, speaking ahead of the last general election in late November 2024, said he had just been told by council officials about the rush of registrations. “I would hazard a guess that an awful lot of those people would also be registered to vote elsewhere.”

The register is a mess, he said. “I would argue that there is a wholesale opportunity for voter fraud.”

Lacey, the Labour councillor, says those handling the register should give a bit of leeway for people who have recently moved.

By law, people have to vote where they are “ordinarily resident”, but some might have a recent address that is reasonable, he says. “If somebody has moved house or is changing jobs, there should be a three- to six-month thing.” 

Lacey says there isn’t the double-voting of 50 years ago. “I don’t think impersonation is a big issue in Ireland.”

After all, there haven’t been any recent allegations along the lines of “Pat O’Connor, Pat O’Connor”, he says 

O’Connor – who was Charlie Haughey’s election agent – was accused of voter impersonation in 1982, and of voting twice in Haughey’s constituency of Dublin North-Central. 

The case against O’Connor collapsed in court. But his christening by Magill magazine stuck. 

After that episode, the law was changed to make it a crime to seek two ballot papers for the same election, says Lacey, the Labour councillor.

At the moment, local authorities outside of Dublin manage separate electoral registers for each area. The four Dublin local authorities, meanwhile, have a combined register.

Dublin City Council is the lead in rolling out a national register – and has been working on that, a spokesperson said. 

A spokesperson said that the Local Government Electoral Registration System (LGERS) project plans to migrate the first local authorities – the four Dublin councils – to the new system after the Dublin Central bye-election.

The remaining local authorities will be migrated in five waves over six months, they said. 

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said that it is aware of positive work being done by councils, since it published its first report on the electoral registers.

The LGERS project is an important step towards managing the electoral registers, they said. 

“When the migration to LGERS is complete, it will facilitate, among other things, the ability to cross check for duplicate entries across the electoral registers,” they said. 

“However, An Coimisiún does not believe that LGERS will in itself address the serious legacy issue, going back decades, of the accuracy of the electoral registers and further work needs to be carried out by local authorities ahead of the next cycle of elections in 2029,” said the spokesperson.

Tracking turnout

Ennis, the Social Democrats councillor and bye-election candidate, said he doesn’t really use the register when campaigning. 

His main concern with the register is the low rates of voter registration and turnout in the constituency, he says. 

Steenson, the independent councillor and candidate, said the same: “The main issue is that people don’t register.”

One of the benefits of an accurate electoral register is being able to determine voter turnout to assess the health of a democracy, says the Electoral Commission’s oversight report from last May. 

“Without accurate electoral registers, it is not possible to estimate actual turnout for our electoral events. This is currently a significant problem associated with our electoral events,” the report says.

Ennis says his assessment of low voter turnout is based less on the electoral register figures, and more on feedback on the doors, he says. 

The number of people who say they are disillusioned and can’t be bothered to vote, he says.

Concern for disengagement is why Lacey, the Labour councillor, wouldn’t be in support of measures that could add further checks at the ballot box, but end up dampening voter turnout further, he says.

“I don’t want to discourage people from voting,” he says. “I think the numbers are too low as it is.”

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said it continuously engages the public to get them to register, reaching out through social media, its website, events like the Rose Festival, Christmas markets – and during National Voter’s Registration Day.

“We are intending to reach out to schools in the coming months to encourage 16+ to register to vote,” they said.  

Horner, the Green Party councillor and candidate, says she hasn’t yet used the register to steer her door-knocking either.

“I go everywhere, because, I guess, certainly in the local elections, there were people who still had the opportunity to register even if they hadn’t,” she said.

As the election gets closed, she may try to be more targeted towards households which are registered with the right to vote in general elections, she said. 

But she doesn’t find the register that useful around the North Inner-City, she says, because people move so often. 

“A lot of the time, you knock on the door, and the register might say there are no voters,” she says. “But they’ll say, ‘Oh, I just moved across.’ ”

Lacey says there are some measures to ensure the accuracy of the register that he would support, such as linking entries to personal public service numbers to prevent duplicates. 

As of December 2024, 25 percent of registered voters in Dublin City had a Personal Public Service Number connected to their entry on the register – up from 6.4 percent at the end of December 2023.

Lacey says that he wouldn’t be against increasing the penalties for voter fraud, he says, and for impersonation and double-voting. “I don’t have anything against that at all.”

Both he and Horner say, though, that they wouldn’t want to see anything that would dampen the franchise – such as more ID checks on the day. 

People at the polling booth are diligent in their oversight and the voting experience should be welcoming, says Horner. “I do think, in general, the issue is more ensuring that the register is accurate.”