Have you ever moved county, city, emigrated even, but still travelled home to vote in your local constituency? Then you may have committed an electoral crime.
It is illegal to vote in an Irish constituency you are not ordinarily resident in. There are loopholes – for example, emigrants are still allowed to vote at home up to 18 months after leaving, and students living away on weekdays can still be considered resident at home.
But for those who have relocated long term and find themselves registered in two constituencies, it is a crime punishable with jail time.
Yet it is also potentially easily done. Only one person was charged with attempting the crime of election fraud in the five years before the last general election.
RM Block
Why just one? Because the electoral register is a mess.
An oversight report published last year by the Electoral Commission found more people were registered to vote than were living in a third of the State’s local authority areas in 2024.
Sligo County Council reported 12 per cent more registered voters than residents, Donegal was 8 per cent and Leitrim 6 per cent.
“Generally there is an issue with the register,” says Thomas Daubler, assistant professor in the UCD School of Politics and International Relations. “There are people on the register who shouldn’t be on it – people who have died or people who have moved away."
In terms of fraud, he says, this “opens up opportunities for people to take a polling card for a deceased relative or former housemate”.
Duplication is also an issue. “Let’s say you formerly lived in Dublin Central – it is your duty to get off the register where you’ve moved from but if you don’t bother – that means you could in principle vote in both places. There are some people who will be tempted to use that opportunity,” Daubler adds.
In theory, an electoral candidate could even arrange for multiple voters to register at an address in the constituency they are running in despite not living there.
Maybe you could pay them or make promises of some benefit in kind once elected.
And in Ireland, until recently, the chances were no one was checking.
Local authorities did not have systems flagging duplicate registrations of voters at two or more addresses – let alone if a voter was ‘ordinarily resident’ at the linked address. They could visit a home to investigate suspected non-resident registered voters, but it is a time-consuming process.
Updates on citizens who had emigrated, or died, presented further problems. Local authorities even reported checking Rip.ie to try to update the register.
Limited by poor communication between authorities and time constraints during election time, different local authorities did not even record the same consistent identifier.
Only 22 per cent of local authorities recorded voters’ personal public service numbers (PPSNs) despite this being the Electoral Commission‘s ideal “key indicator of accuracy”. Seventy per cent record Eircodes and 72 per cent record dates of birth – the combined metric considered the second-best indicator of accuracy given the current state of the register.
Where the register was most overinflated, the lowest number of dates of birth and Eircodes were recorded.
Even if local authorities tried to check and remove someone it was a data nightmare. Under the Electoral Reform Act 2022, removal can involve local authorities making three documented attempts to contact an elector before taking them off the register.
If they make a mistake and remove someone arbitrarily, they could find themselves guilty of infringing on someone’s right to vote.
“A lot of the responsibility for managing it is local and we have a really local system for managing it that is underfunded,” says Tiarnán McDonough, democracy researcher with Think-tank for Action on Social Change (TASC). “Relative to the rest of the EU, Ireland has one of the least funded local governments”.
The Electoral Commission is working to change that. After its oversight report was published last May, it began a multiyear project to clean up the register and move to a single national registration system.
This would mean all local authorities cleaning up their registers and moving the data on to a database that would flag if a voter is registered in other areas, to trigger investigations.
All new voters applying online will be required to provide their PPSN to identify themselves, and to verify their address in government records. Funding has been set aside for each local authority to clean up their registers and make the transition.
Yet even in the effort to clean it up the scale of the problem it exposes is staggering. There were reported to have been more than 146,000 deletions from registers during 2024 and another 158,000 last year. This rate is expected to continue in the coming years until the estimated total excess entries – up to 500,000 – are fully reduced before the next general election, due to take place in 2029.
“Electoral integrity is very simple,” said Electoral Commission chief executive Art O’Leary. “People have to have confidence in the process so they can trust the result.
“Anything that damages that is a bad thing. This is why we’ve been so open and honest about genuine attempts to close that gap ... By the time we get to 2029 it is my sincere hope that we have narrowed that gap to something that is infinitesimally small.”
Onboarding to the new system that will flag duplicate PPSNs will begin next month, with this Friday’s byelections set to be the last votes before the transition.
In Dublin Central in 2024, the number of registered voters with an Eircode and a date of birth combined was 88 per cent. Just a quarter of them were linked to a PPSN. It was worse again in Galway West. In Galway county, combined Eircodes and dates of birth were recorded for 29 per cent of voters, with PPSNs linked to just 19 per cent.
Liz Carolan, executive director of democratic advocacy group Digital Action, says the inflated register creates an opportunity for something that is an even bigger risk than actual voter fraud – the allegation of it.
“More people would claim fraud than there actually is fraud,” she adds. “It’s a mess, but the bigger risk is someone could claim an election is stolen because it is so messy.”
