The ongoing controversy over the electoral register has illustrated a remarkable fact: the last few general elections in this country have been conducted on an utterly incompetent basis, with hundreds of thousands of people being registered to vote who were either ineligible or dead, while a smaller, but significant, number of eligible voters were not actually registered.
Considering that in our system of proportional representation seats are sometimes decided by a handful of votes, there is no knowing how the outcome of elections may have been influenced by the completely inadequate register.
Dick Spring famously held his Kerry seat by four votes in 1987, while Michael Finucane of Fine Gael actually lost his Limerick West seat by just one vote in 2002 to party colleague Dan Neville.
More significantly in terms of the effect on national politics, the shape of the government in 1992 ultimately hinged on whether the last seat in Dublin South Central would go to Ben Briscoe of Fianna Fáil or Eric Byrne of Democratic Left. A victory for Byrne would have kept open the prospect of a rainbow government but, in the event, he lost by just five votes after a week of recounts and the seat and the government office went to Fianna Fáil as a consequence.
If one of the fledgling democracies of the Balkans, or some developing country, had conducted their elections with the ineptness that has clearly been the case in this country for successive elections, United Nations observers would have had something to say about it.
It is now clear that voter turnout has not been declining at the alarming rate that all the experts believed.
Between 1982 and 2002 it dropped from 74 per cent to 62 per cent of registered voters but, as we now know officially, the register itself had been moving further and further from reality.
There was something strange about the fact that there was such a passionate political controversy over the botched introduction of electronic voting in recent years, yet the much more significant problem of a hopelessly inadequate register has only been forced on to the agenda very late in the day as the next election looms.
The worrying aspect of the problem is that politicians and civil servants knew about it and did absolutely nothing to sort it out.
It represents another example of the inertia that appears to grip the decision-making process in this country on all sorts of issues, from the country's energy requirements to pensions. It is only when a crisis point is reached that action is taken.
Eamon Gilmore of the Labour Party was the first politician to take up the cudgels in a serious way after a detailed investigation by Shane Coleman and Odran Flynn in the Sunday Tribune drew attention to the massive scale of the problem.
Mr Gilmore proposed that the register be updated by the census enumerators in early summer, but this apparently sensible approach was rejected on the basis that the confidentiality of the census could be compromised.
There was a suspicion in political circles that the real objection was that local authorities did not want to forfeit the control and the finance that came with the responsibility for revising the register.
In any case, the Minister for the Environment Dick Roche ordered them to carry out a comprehensive campaign and he allocated more than €12 million for its implementation.
The result was that the first genuine attempt in decades to compile an accurate register was undertaken and more than half a million names were deleted from the old register.
Unsurprisingly, as well as people who had died and moved, many genuine voters were deleted, either because they didn't return the forms distributed by the local authorities, or because administrative errors were made.
Among the deleted voters was the Labour TD for Kildare South, Jack Wall.
The closing date for people to get their names on to the draft register was yesterday, but that deadline has been extended for a further two weeks by the Minister and people now have until December 8th to get themselves registered, and the local authorities have until the end of December to finalise the lists.
The current hullabaloo over striking eligible voters from the register has served a good purpose by publicising the issue and forcing the political system to respond intelligently.
It also points up the obligation on individual citizens to exercise their responsibility and ensure that they are registered to vote.
Official figures compiled by the local authorities and passed on to the Department of the Environment show that since the drive to clean up the register began, 505,042 names have been deleted, while 379,394 voters have been added.
The startling bottom line is that officials estimate that there were close to 400,000 names on the old register that should not have been there.
Some incredible anecdotal evidence has emerged during the course of the campaign about the reasons for this.
In one local authority area, where a substantial number of dead people remained on the register, it emerged that officials had been operating on the basis of death notices in newspapers to take people off the register.
It apparently never occurred to them to get the official list from the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths.
Such stories raise questions about the competence of local government in other areas apart from the electoral register.
The good news is that, assuming most of those deleted who are genuinely entitled to vote get back on the register, the turnout and the result of the next election will actually reflect the true state of mind of the electorate.