Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry for prolonging it but this is an area in which politicians have a deep interest. I wish to ask Mr. O'Leary a question about the electoral process issue he outlined, namely, that of spoiled votes. We are all frustrated. I see several thousand spoiled votes in Wexford every single election. It becomes numbing when you see it at a European election, where there are actually supermarket trolley-loads. We watch the counts carefully and I know there are people in my constituency and probably every constituency who have spoiled their votes since the first vote they gave by putting X on a number of individuals. They think they have voted and that their vote registered. The commission's role in combating that is to explain the thing most people are afraid to ask, namely, how to vote. I am not talking about children. I am talking about reaching out to adults and saying this constitutes a spoiled vote. A related matter that was touched upon earlier is that relating to the sequential vote. There are some people, and I have seen it and it is normally accepted, who vote with X, and then two X's, three X's and four X's, or who vote in Roman numerals, I, II, III, IV and so on. They are normally accepted because they are determined to be a clear indication. Is the issue of reducing spoiled votes by ensuring people know how to vote part of your remit? How are you going to go about it?

We also talked about duplicates on the electoral register.

There is an even more egregious thing. There is the adage in terms of law that it is better for a guilty person to go free than an innocent person to be convicted. I would prefer to have somebody registered twice than to have somebody removed from the register and deprived of their right to vote, which does happen. Sometimes it can only be malicious because, no matter what is said, people who are decades in the same location do not check the register. If a person has voted for the last 30 years in the one polling booth, they assume they are on it. Is there some way that people could be notified that they are about to be deleted from the register so that we can be sure that is what is intended?