O'Dea concedes register 'a mess'

Outgoing Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea has conceded that there were major problems with the electoral register during voting in the general election on Thursday.

As his party prepares to enter governement, Mr O'Dea said he was inundated with complaints from his own constituents about problems with voting.

"My office is lierally full of messages about the register," he told Today FM's Matt Cooper this morning.

"I met people who have been voting in this constituency for the last 20 years who were taken off the register and were refused their right to vote for what reason I can't understand.

"I just can't understand why the register is in such a mess but obviously there are huge problems with the register. I have to concede that." Mr O'Dea topped the poll in his Limerick constituency with almost 20,000 first-preference votes.

Minister for the Environment and Local Government Dick Roche set about updating the electoral register in the summer of 2006, amid concerns that the lists were out of date and open to abuse.

However, the removal of more than 500,000 people from the register provoked controversy when many citizens found their name had been wrongly deleted.

After the Department of the Environment estimated that 170,000 of the 500,000 removed could be entitled to vote, Mr Roche gave local authorities further time to update their registers.

Subsequently more than 84,000 names were added to the electoral register.

Minister for the Environment Dick Roche pronounced earlier this year that the protracted process of updating the register had been a success and promised that there would be extra checks against electoral fraud on polling day.

"What we've ended up with is the most up-to-date register for a quarter of a century. It's also the best register in Europe at the moment, and the basis for further improvements," he said in February. However, he said there was "no doubt" that some voters were still registered more than once.

There were several reports on Thursday of people being registered in more than one place and others who had been removed from the register without their knowledge.