Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and his officials to the House. I acknowledge, as previous speakers have done, that there was great collaborative work on the Bill by the joint committee. I thank all those who were actively involved and participated in it. I welcome this Bill on the whole. I look forward to the debate, because there are a number of issues to tease out. I will not repeat what other people have said.

On the maintenance of the electoral registers, I am a strong advocate for local democracy and for local authorities. However, on this occasion, it is right that the 31 local authorities should be duplicating or carrying out the monitoring of their own registers. I do not doubt the capacity, inability or the integrity of a local authority but we should have a shared service. One local authority should co-ordinate it. We need a vast improvement on and professionalisation of how we manage the registers. I would have thought that would have all been a matter for the electoral commission to decide on. Maybe in time it will. However, there are different sets of circumstances. In my own local authority of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, the local authority staff do not call door-to-door. That is a policy decision that was made. In other parts of the country, the council sends out field workers to knock on doors. How they operate the system is, therefore, discretionary. We know that from old registers and out-of-date registers that everything needs to be tidied up. We need to embrace technology. I would clearly like to see another way. This would be a central authority that would manage these registers in a focused and professional way. It is the right thing to do. I have spoken to a number of members of local authority management who say they see the merit in this idea. We can leave this issue to another time, but I want flag that. It is important to say that.

I turn to the issue of lotteries and funding for parties. I fully support the right to raise funds. That is democracy. We live in a democracy. If people want to commit their money to their church, to an organisation, to a sports club or to a political party that is compliant with the law and this is within the parameters of the guidelines set down under legislation, I fully support that. People work hard. They are entitled to make a conscious choice to make a reasonable donation based on their means. That is a matter for themselves and I support that.

I have mentioned the issue of pre-legislative scrutiny. I am not sure that this is addressed enough in the legislation. It is becoming practice for candidates in elections to send out mock ballot papers a day or two before an election. I have been subject to one of those. When I was running as a local authority candidate, a colleague of mine rang me and said that she had picked up a mock ballot paper from one of the parties. I did not appear to have a picture on it, but I was a silhouette in black, although some were not. I was also described loosely as “an activist”. It did not say I was a community activist; it just said I was an activist. It incorrectly gave my address as a different electoral ward from the one I in which I lived. My neighbour stopped the individual candidate, who has since gone on to greater things in these Houses, and asked, “What is going on?” He said, “Oh, it is just politics.” The neighbour said, “I want you to stop doing it or I will not be voting for you.” He undertook to do so but an hour later his wife went down and met the same politician who was doing the same thing. One might say that this was only a local election, and I won the election comfortably, as did the other four candidates. The point I am trying to make is that we must look at that.A mocked-up official ballot paper could perhaps remove candidates who are alphabetically ahead of the candidate who produces it. A mock ballot paper can present very false information and set out a professional person as someone else. I so happened to have been a long-standing elected member. The official ballot paper, which I checked the next day, described me as an elected member, a sitting councillor. This is something that is coming up only today; I have not really given a lot of thought to it. However, what I describe is potentially very damaging. We need to keep an eye on it. It is not right that anyone should purport to have and circulate an official ballot paper. Once it has a sense of officialdom, people believe it must be the final race card. There is potential for abuse in this regard.

On the issue of the marked registers, I hear what is being said but it is important to be honest in this debate. The public at large do not know there is such a thing as a marked register. We might rightly talk about the right of privacy at the ballot box but there is such a thing as a marked register for which one can apply for a given number of weeks after an election, either from the local authority or, in the case of a general election, the Oireachtas. Many members of the public would be horrified at the thought that the law allows for marked registers. If we are going to talk about people capturing, using or manipulating data, we must be honest with the public that, at this very time, it is permissible in law to have marked registers that show who presented for a ballot. It does not necessarily mean one voted but that one presented at a polling station for a ballot paper. One might not have exercised one's vote and might have taken the ballot paper home. We need to reconsider this matter. While I am aware of the political advantages of having the information, I am saying that if we are to talk about the issues of data, where registers end up and how they are used, we need to talk about this subject. I am going to revisit it through an amendment.

This is great work. There is cross-party collaboration. Mindful of all that is in this legislation, we must encourage more people to vote. I do not want to stymie political activity. It is great that people are active and engaged and participating in elections. We must be mindful that everything we do in this legislation is about encouraging people to participate in the political process and to vote.

I would love it if we could revisit at some stage the debate on giving 16-year-olds the right to participate in the election process. The Minister of State’s party drove the idea more than any other. The debate may be for another day but I do not want to lose the opportunity to consider giving the franchise to 16-year-olds, certainly in local elections, if it is practical and possible.