Roche denies claims of 600,000 deleted voters

The suggestion that thousands of people will lose their vote before the next election is "exaggerated", Minister for the Environment…

The suggestion that thousands of people will lose their vote before the next election is "exaggerated", Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said today.

The latest figures provided to the Department of the Environment suggest some 600,000 names (approximately 20 per cent) have been removed from the register.

At the time of the 2002 General Election it was calculated that there were 300,000 people on the voting register who shouldn't have been on it
Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche

However Mr Roche claimed there was an acceptable margin of error in registering millions of voters and urged people to check their details on www.checktheregister.ie

Speaking on RTÉ radio he said: "At the time of the 2002 General Election it was calculated that there were 300,000 people on the voting register who shouldn't have been on it."

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Mr Roche said it had since been calculated that there were 800,000 errors on the register. "This year for the very first time we've actually decided to do a very thorough job on the register. There's over 1.25 million households have been visited. There have been about 1500 additional field workers in the field and they've gone out and they've found hundreds of thousands of errors."

He cited Waterford city as a classic example where 1400 people who had died were found to be on the register.

He said voters have up to November 25th to fill in their forms. Those who miss this deadline can still get onto the supplementary register up to 15 days before voting, although he admitted it is more difficult to get on this way. "The suggestion that thousands of people are going to lose their vote is, to put it mildly, exaggerated," he said.

Mr Roche said there are about 3.5 million people over 18 years old, and over 1.25 million households in the State. "Of course there's an acceptable level of error. Nobody is going to get literally the millions and millions of entries and cross-entries 100 per cent right." He said the main difficulty with updating the register was people moving house.

Responding to calls from Labour Party TD Eamon Gilmore for the November deadline for registration to be extended he said: "That can't change without changing primary law."

Mr Gilmore said: "It would have been a lot less complex earlier this year if he had listened to the Labour Party and used the census enumeration to update the register. Remember that last April every single dwelling was called to by enumerators collecting the census. So why do the job twice?"

Speaking during Leaders' Questions in the Dáil this morning, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte called on Minister for Finance Brian Cowen to take personal responsibility for the issue of voters being deleted from the register.

"We're boasting about how wealthy a nation we are and we can't event compile the most basic electoral register accurately," he said. "There are banks, finance houses and credit card companies that have more accurate records of the citizenry than does the electoral register."