WORK IS UNDER way to reform the electoral register but it won’t have any impact on the presidential election, meaning it still includes “hundreds of thousands” of names that shouldn’t be there.

That’s according to An Coimisiún Toghchái chief Art O’Leary who said this was due to duplication of names from when people have moved house or died but have not yet been taken off the register of eligible voters.

Recent months have seen local authorities check in with registered voters where they have two addresses for them due to the person having moved house.

The independent electoral commission has been out in recent months trying to get more people signed up to vote, hitting the likes of Electric Picnic to Dublin city centre in a bid to add people to the register.

O’Leary told The Journal that 61,000 people approximately have been added to the register for this week’s election, which he “sincerely hopes” is mainly made up of the 60,000 young people who have turned 18 this year.

“If you don’t vote the first and second time after you turn 18, then our research shows it won’t become a habit,” O’Leary explained.

The latest total number of people on the electoral presidential electors is 3,612,957.

At present the electoral register is split up by dozens of registers held by the country’s local councils, with work under way to collate this into one single register.

O’Leary said this plan to migrate the register will be ready by next year. He estimates it will be finally ready for 2029.

“It’s a long hard slog but we are starting to create identifiers for individuals. So anyone who registers to vote online, now we have their PPS, number, their date of birth and their eircode, so if they move addresses, we’ll be able to remove the duplicates easily enough,” O’Leary.

At present, O’Leary believes the actual register has an inflated number of voters – probably somewhere between 200,000 and half a million people.

This also complicates any analysis of turnout. If the register is wrongly showing an overly high number of voters, then it may be incorrect to claim that turnout is low when the results come in this weekend.

He believes that turnout figures are “probably out” by around 4% to 6%.

“If turnout is low then there is a narrative that the Irish people couldn’t be bothered voting but it’s a bit more complicated than that,” O’Leary said.

As for other impacts on turnout, O’Leary said the commission is examining ways to make voting more convenient.

“In the General Election over half of people who couldn’t vote said it was because they couldn’t make it home in time. We don’t necessarily make it easy for people to vote in this country.”

O’Leary promised that there is more work to come in this regard, including examining whether an extension of postal voting and advance voting should be considered.

He said that the 2020 general election being held on a Saturday was a test to see if it was more convenient, but said it resulted in a turnout drop of 2.4% (although the inflated register would have played a role in skewing this too).

“We found that families are busy on Saturdays and people with disabilities were also in a tough position because their carers don’t work Saturdays. It’s always trickier than you’d think,” O’Leary said.

The final message to people who may not be energised by the campaign is a very simple one, O’Leary outlined.

“One of the candidates on this ballot paper is going to be our head of state and people should have their voice heard.”

Polls open at 7am tomorrow.