Registers of electors should be automated and teenagers who turn 18 should automatically be placed on the register, a Kerry councillor has said.
As the new draft register of electors for Co Kerry was published yesterday, Cllr Michael Healy-Rae (Ind), said a number of people who had been dead for years were still on the register for the last local elections.
He had also come across numerous cases of people omitted who should have been on the register.
Mr Healy-Rae said he did not know of any case where voting cards of the dead had been used. However, it was "very distressing" for their families to still receive voting cards for their loved ones, in some cases years after they had died.
A report from Kerry County Council said there could be "some difficulty" in removing the names of all those who had died from the register as fathers and sons with similar names often lived in the same house "and the wrong person could be deleted".
The report, compiled by Mr Michael McMahon and Ms Liz O'Donnell of the council's corporate service department, said electoral registers were increasingly difficult to compile, because local knowledge gathered from traditional sources was less effective than before.
The degree of "mobility and change within communities is such that local knowledge gathered from parish priests, gardaí and other local contacts is less effective than before", the council warned in a reply to claims that the old register was incorrect and that the system needed to be simplified.
Young people were moving out of home into flats and there were high numbers of immigrant hotel and other workers in Kerry now, and keeping track of all the movement made the job of enumerators "very difficult", it said.
Thirty enumerators, locally based and employed part-time, compile the register of electors in the county, a task which the council described as "extremely labour intensive".
The enumerators conducted house-to-house inquiries and matched them with inquiries at post offices, with gardaí and so on. The onus was on each individual to make sure they were on the electoral role, it added.
The electoral register in Kerry will go on display in post offices, Garda stations, area offices and town councils.
Copies will also be sent to all elected members, accompanied by claim sheets for additions or deletions for the revision courts in December, where they will be decided by the county registrar.