DID FEWER THAN 60% of registered voters cast their ballots in last Friday’s general election? 

Almost certainly not – in fact, the real turnout is certainly higher, political analysts have told The Journal. 

Theresa Reidy, a politics professor at University College Cork, said Ireland’s figures are “nonsense”, and are probably becoming more inaccurate over time, meaning we should be careful when making assumptions regarding Irish society’s attitude to democracy overall.

Psephologist Odran Flynn suggested voters hearing reports of low turnout may feel less inspired to vote themselves – when the reality is that Ireland’s messy electoral register is likely to be giving us an inaccurate picture of real turnout.

Flynn adds that while turnout is being underestimated, it’s nevertheless on a downward trajectory from one recent election to the next. 

But Reidy noted that the absolute number of people who voted in 2024 was higher than in 2020.

Official turnout on Friday was 59.7% of registered voters, down over 3 points on the 2020 election’s figure. This was despite over 400,000 people registering to vote this year, including over 115,000 in November alone on the back of a public awareness campaign by the new Electoral Commission. 

This is not a new issue. When The Journal Investigates examined previous elections on a European scale earlier this year, our team found that Ireland’s voter turnout in all elections is well below the EU average. 

Half a million phantom voters?

The register may have as many as 500,000 people on it who should not be there, according to Flynn, a HR executive who has been analysing the register for over two decades. 

This estimate has been described by Art O’Leary, the head of the independent Electoral Commission, as “plausible”. 

Flynn told The Journal that the actual turnout in the 2024 general election was probably 8 to 9 percentage points higher than the official figure.

However, turnout is still falling from one election to the next, Flynn said.

The turnout figure for the 2011 general election was 69.9%. In 2016 it was down to 65.1%, and then in 2020 it fell to 62.9%.

The 500,000 figure came from an analysis Flynn conducted comparing the number of registered voters with the number of eligible voters, based on 2022 census data. 

Flynn’s analysis found that there was roughly a one-to-one ratio of eligible voters and registered voters, which he said was not the case. He estimated the actual percentage of registered eligible voters to be around 85%, which is the norm in Western democracies. 

“The turnout last weekend was 2.2 million against an official register of 3.7 million. However, the maximum possible number of people who could have registered was 3.45 million,” which would amount to 100% registration of eligible voters, Flynn explained. 

“85% of that figure is 2.8 million, which suggests that the register may now be out by up to 600,000.” 

The Electoral Commission’s O’Leary says there are “many, many legacy issues” with the register.

The presence of extra names on the register can be the result of people moving constituency and re-registering, meaning someone can be registered in more than one constituency at the same time. 

The numbers on the register can also be inflated because in some cases people’s names remain on the register after they have died or emigrated. Irish citizens who have left Ireland for longer than 18 months are not entitled to vote. 

“There are definitely inaccuracies in the register,” said political commentator Claire McGing.

McGing noted anecdotal reports of polling information cards being sent out for people who are deceased, and of people receiving ballots to, for example, their own address and their parents’ address.

Reidy, of UCC, told The Journal that the presence of hundreds of thousands of extra names on the register is nothing new. 

As far back as 2006, then Environment Minister Dick Roche conceded that there may be up to 500,000 people on the register who were not supposed to be there. At the time, Roche received funding to address the issues with the register and some progress was made until the financial crisis of 2008 hit.

“I suspect that actually, the registers have become more inaccurate, rather than less,” said Reidy, adding that the “turnout figures basically are nonsense”.

“In fact, I would go so far as to say that turnout, thought of as a percentage, is highly misleading.”

“I mean, the only thing we know is that they’re wrong. The one thing they’re not is accurate. 

“And so there’s a downward trend in terms of the numbers of people, the percentage of people voting, but it’s also quite likely that the registers are getting more and more inaccurate as time is going on.

“So there’s literally no way of evaluating turnout. And I’d be very cautious about kind of wringing my hands and saying, oh, democracy is in decline.”

In fact, Reidy says, there are several indicators suggesting democracy in Ireland is in good health.

“We’ve never had more political parties, we had 150 extra candidates [in the latest general election] – and those things we can actually measure in concrete terms. We know that in absolute numbers as well, more people voted in 2024 than did in 2020.”

The number of votes cast increased by just over 1,000 between 2020 and 2024. In both elections, the number of votes cast was roughly 2.2 million. 

Cleaning up the register

To make things more complicated, the electoral register is not centralised, with 31 separate local authorities maintaining their own lists. 

This siloed approach means that one authority does not know if a person is also registered in another part of the country. 

O’Leary, of the Electoral Commission, explained: “If you’re a student in Kerry, and you grow up in Kerry, and then you go and study in Cork, and then do your masters in Dublin, and get your first job in Waterford, and then meet a lovely Galway girl and settle down and Mayo, chances are you could have built up four or five separate addresses on the electoral register, and we would never know.”

It’s a legacy problem that’s been going on for decades.”

O’Leary said that cleaning up the registers and collating them into one centralised database is a priority for the commission, but it will take time.

First, each local authority has to review and clean up their own register before the data can be brought together into a single database. 

Work on the national database is due to begin in October 2026. 

O’Leary said cleaning up the register is one of the commission’s “absolute priorities”.

Once the national database has been compiled, local authorities will still have responsibility for their own registers, O’Leary explained. 

“The individual registers won’t disappear once we have the database, but the database will inform the individual registers,” he said.

Odran Flynn said he believes the Electoral Commission should approach reforming the register in the same way as Northern Ireland did after the Good Friday Agreement when the existing registers were scrapped and a new list was started from scratch. 

Flynn described the Commission’s efforts to get people to register as “very impressive”, but he is sceptical that the unwieldy local authority lists can be adequately cleaned up in order to create the Commission’s planned national database. 

Related Reads

Low election turnout: 'Do we need to think like Australia and bring in compulsory voting?'

Mary Lou McDonald pledges to stick around as Sinn Féin leader for next five years

What have the 15 independent TDs said about joining a government?

He also said that a new system should be based on PPS numbers, as it was in Northern Ireland when the equivalent ID number was used in compiling the new register. 

Restrictive system 

Another potential reason for the low turnout is Ireland’s restrictive voting system, which obliges people to vote in person on a specific day, with some exceptions. 

Other countries allow voters more flexibility, for example by allowing widespread postal voting, early voting or voting by proxy.

The limitations of the Irish system mean that voter turnout is not as accurate a way to measure engagement as it might be in other jurisdictions, O’Leary said. 

“It is such a blunt instrument by which to measure public engagement. You know, there are many, many people who want to vote in elections who don’t get to vote for a variety of reasons. 

“You might be away with work, or you might be on holidays or whatever, you can’t make it, and we don’t make it that easy for people to vote.”

O’Leary pointed to the example of Australia as a point of contrast with Ireland’s niche system.

“You know, in Australia, for instance, where there is mandatory voting, they do everything they can to get people to vote. So, if you live in the Outback and you’re 1,000 miles from your nearest polling station, they’ll fly a helicopter to your house with a ballot box.” 

In Ireland, the vast majority of the public have to go to a polling station on the day of the election and cast their ballots in person. 

Exemptions exist for elderly people in care homes, people with disabilities and people who work in industries like aviation and haulage. 

Residents of care homes have ballots brought to them while people with disabilities need a doctor’s note in order to vote by post. 

Those who are travelling for work on the day can also vote by post. 

“And these are very unused and very limited circumstances in which you can have a postal vote. About 31,000 people had postal votes or special votes in this election just gone,” O’Leary said. 

Apathy 

For some commentators, apathy and disillusionment among the public had a major influence on turnout that fits into a longer running trend of decreasing engagement in recent Irish general elections.

“I think this is huge,” said Claire McGing.

Declining turnout since the 2016 general election, McGing explained, tallies with global trends in democracies worldwide.

One potential explanation for increased disillusionment this time round was the result of the last general election, when a large number of young people voted for the first time and many cast their ballots for Sinn Féin, McGing said. 

“We know that there was certainly an increase in youth participation in 2020,” she said. 

“And their perception, you know, rightly or wrongly, was that they voted for Sinn Féin, for change, for a new government, and they may have felt, ‘Well, look, what’s the point? I voted for that party in 2020 and they didn’t get into government’. 

“There’s probably a perception they were blocked from government,” McGing said, while adding that the reality was Sinn Féin did not have the numbers to form a coalition. 

“It’s not just in Ireland, but it’s certainly something worth looking at, and it’s not going to change overnight.”