Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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274. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the reason certain parts of the Voter.ie website are only available if a person lives in Dublin; when Voter.ie was implemented; and the reason that a public information campaign is not in place to raise public awareness of this service. [56352/22]

Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party)
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Voter.ie is an initiative of the Dublin local authorities that offers online registration via MyGovID on its front end portal and a shared back-end database within which each Dublin local authority continues to manage the electoral register for its own administrative area. The public Voter.ie portal went live in 2019 and the Dublin authorities have since run a number of awareness campaigns around Voter.ie to raise awareness of the service.

The Electoral Reform Act 2022, enacted on 25 July, delivers the legislative underpinning for a range of significant electoral reforms set out in the “Programme for Government – Our Shared Future”. Provisions commenced on 13 October under S.I. No. 512 of 2022, included those provisions necessary for the introduction of the new processes in relation to electoral registration.

As part of progressing the commitment to developing a national shared electoral registration system, as provided for in the legislation, a governance structure drawn from central and local government has been put in place to consider the further development of Voter.ie in this regard. Dublin City Council is the lead authority for this project which is expected to go to tender in H1 2023. 

To ensure that the benefits of the modernised registration process are available across the country, www.checktheregister.ie site was upgraded for use by all local authorities in the intervening period.   People can now use checktheregister.ie to register for the first time and confirm or update their details by adding their PPSN, date of birth and Eircode.    As of 14 November almost 20,000 people across all 31 local authority areas have used the site to register or update their details.  Voter.ie with MyGovID authentication remains an additional option for electors in Dublin.

This current data quality phase of the electoral registration modernisation project enables people to easily update their own details and will assist all local authorities in improving the quality and integrity of the register and is therefore the subject of a national awareness campaign which began on 7 November and will run to 2 December.   The new national system, once available, will facilitate further data quality improvements while enabling a single high level of data protection and security to be applied to the data underpinning the electoral register.