Parties line up legal teams for 'count' disputes
THE chaotic state of the electoral register has led the political parties to assemble top legal teams to battle over results on election day, the Sunday Independent has learned.
The register, which is likely to be at least 15 per cent inaccurate on polling day, is one of a number of reasons that each of the parties will look to their top legal teams to secure as many of the 166 Dail seats as they can.
While they are now primarily concerned with hitting the pavements, and shaking the hand of their constituents, the parties are preparing for the counts, many of which could be disputed.
The Sunday Independent has learned that the parties have each assembled their top legal teams who will be deployed to any count centre at a moment's notice if required.
Under the PR-STV system, Ireland has seen seats decided by single-digit margins, but only after considerable legal argument. This weekend, a number of legal experts have said that Dick Roche's admission that the register is "a mess", could lead to chaos in the courts with defeated candidates from around the country taking cases.
Officially, the parties were saying little on the subject yesterday, but said that the presence of legal teams in an election is "par for the course".
A spokesman for the Labour party yesterday told the Sunday Independent: "We have a legal team available to us to deal with issues around the counting of votes. When seats are being decided by four or five votes, we have our lawyers to ensure that all votes are counted correctly. There is still a problem with the register alright, but at the moment, we are just concerned with getting on with the election."
The chaos of the register in recent months has led to successive calls that responsibility for it be given to an Electoral Commission.
The local authorities have claimed that they have never been given enough resources to collate it properly.
More than 80,000 voters had their names restored to the electoral register earlier this year after the controversy broke last year that it was 20 per cent "inaccurate". It was reported that as many as 200,000 entries on the register were "wrong".
Thirty-one out of 34 local authority register figures showed that 77,000 voters missing from the draft voting register last November have had their names restored. A further 7,000 non-Dail voters - those entitled to vote in either European or local elections only - have also been added to the list.
This represents a drop of about 60,000 voters in the register for 2007 compared with the last voting register.
