Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to address the committee on the issue of an electoral commission.

As was pointed out, I was Chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government in the previous Dáil and we looked at the issue of the voters register. I am fully supportive of the electoral commission. It is a very good idea and it needs to be broadly based and given a very broad remit. The issues which should not be included in it are policy issues regarding legislation and constitutional matters which should be left to the appropriate Department, and boundaries should not be within its remit either. If the electoral commission deals with election activities on a day-to-day basis, the staff involved could influence boundary changes for their own administrative convenience. It would be like giving local authority managers the power to set electoral boundaries. They would consider the staff in each area and what suits them from an administrative point of view, and they might adjust the boundaries to suit the internal administration of the organisation. This is why the boundaries should be independent of the commission.

A key issue which I have mentioned before is the voters' register. We should have one national voters' register. At present each local authority goes about the work on an individual basis. There are set procedures but there is an element of local interpretation of how various matters are dealt with, such as supplementary registers, second supplementary registers and draft registers. An essential element of the voters' register is that a PPS number would have to be produced for a name to be on the register, but I stress the PPS number would not appear on the register. It would be used by the registration authority for administrative purposes and subject to data control legislation. It would also facilitate ease of transfer if people move house. It is a bit of an ordeal to move from a Dublin register to the Laois register or the Cork South-West register, and this would make it very easy. This job should be given to an organisation such as An Post, as its employees call to every house regularly and know the people and the landscape. Perhaps the new postcodes could help in this area. Local authorities are not the organisations to do it. In the normal course of their work, its employees do not normally call to people's houses and are not best placed. It might upset some staff, who are used to the official nixer of checking the register every so often when the time comes, but they should not be involved in it. It should be done independently by An Post.

The electoral commission should subsume the role of the Standards in Public Office Commission and the Referendum Commission. Each time a referendum is called a new commission is set up with a new chairman. If improvements are made or mistakes are learned during the course of one referendum a permanent body should learn from them for the next time. The electrical commission should be responsible for the control of and reporting on all donations and election expenses, including at local authority level. If we are to have one central body, we should not exclude local government from it.

The single biggest cost of every election so far is the cost of issuing the election address. If five voters are in a house and six parties and candidates issue election addresses, it means 30 pieces of literature at 70 cent each are sent to that house. It is by far the biggest cost of running an election campaign. I suggest, such as what happens in a referendum, that when people hand in their nomination papers and are photographed for the ballot paper, a short biography along with that photograph should be included in one booklet to be issued to every voter, with the candidates' names in alphabetical order and a page for each person. It would be like an information leaflet. One document is enough for each voter. The cost of it would finance everything involved in establishing an electoral commission because a substantial cost would be removed from it.

The commission needs to examine the question of people with disabilities who have difficulties with sight and those who are away with work or on holidays. This leads us to the bigger issues of electronic voting and distance voting. They should be re-examined by the commission from a practical administrative point of view. I know electronic voting has a troubled history in Ireland and I hope it can be looked at again.

The electoral commission also needs to look at an education process for voters. It is not generally appreciated that approximately 20,000 spoiled votes are cast in every general election. Most constituencies have between 500 and 700 spoiled votes. In ten, 15 or 20 constituencies the difference between the last two candidates for the last seat is less than the number of spoiled votes in the constituency, so there is a phenomenal number of spoiled votes and this needs to be addressed. An electoral commission should look at it.

There needs to be a clear timeframe as the commission cannot do it all on day one. It should be established with a mandate to deal with the register or to take over the role of SIPO first, over a three to five year period, and when the responsibilities are clearly identified as to what the functions will be, we can then speak about the reporting and accountability mechanisms to the Oireachtas. I will not go into detail on it because my time is short.