WOMAN DENIED VOTE: I FELT ROBBED
6 PAGES OF REFERENDUM COVERAGE INSIDE
A GREYSTONES woman who was unable to vote last Friday due to an administrative error by Wicklow County Council has said she ‘felt robbed’.
The woman had applied in time to be included on the supplemental register. The council acknowledged the error and said it was one of nine instances in Co. Wicklow. Legislation prevented the people from being included once the error had been discovered.
AN administrative error at Wicklow County Council meant that one woman in Greystones was not, as she thought, included on the supplemental register.
The council said that this was one of nine similar cases. ‘ Today, I feel sad,’ said the woman last Friday, as polling stations opened. ‘I put so much documentation together as I wanted to be completely sure. This vote was important to me. I scanned it in and didn’t receive a bounce back on my email so I thought everything was fine. I went off on my holidays and thought it strange last week when I didn’t get the card.’
She phoned the council to check what was happening.
‘I was told there were no documents attached to my email but I double checked and they were there.’
She received an email of apology, as well as a phone call from the returning officer. The officials’ hands were tied by the legislation. With the supplemental register complete, she couldn’t be included on it. The deadline for inclusion was May 8.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong here, I felt robbed,’ she said. ‘I was very upset. I made a decision to just go out and canvass so I’ve been canvassing all week, as my small contribution.’
In a letter last week, the council acknowledged that she had submitted her application in time and that the RFA3 was overlooked in an administrative error.
‘Unfortunately, it is not possible to add you to the supplement at this point and I deeply regret this error,’ said the letter.
In a subsequent statement, Wicklow County Council said a small number of potential voters who submitted applications to be included on the supplement to the register had to be turned away from the polling station. This was notwithstanding that their applications were properly completed, witnessed and submitted prior to the deadline.
Anne Marie Roberts, from the Franchise Section of Wicklow County Council, said that in some cases applications via email were not printed off. In most cases, the original signed application form was received in the Freepost service a day or so later and that form was processed in the normal way.
However, in nine cases, the original documentation was not subsequently received and the applications were not processed.
‘We are very sorry for any potential voter that this has happened to,’ she said. ‘We are carrying out a full review of the matter with a view to preventing any recurrence. It was a regrettable and unfortunate clerical error.’
Ms Roberts said there was less understanding for hopeful voters turning up to vote but who had not previously engaged with the registration system and who had not checked the register, in spite of the very visible and high-profile voter registration campaign leading up to Friday’s vote.
‘ The voting register is compiled every year. That is the law,’ she said. ‘Just because a person voted in the last election or referendum does not mean that they are still registered. We do send out correspondence to voters before we delete them, but if people choose not to engage, there is little we can do for them.’
‘We cannot simply leave people on the register if they fail to respond to letters sent to their registration address.
We would soon have a huge register containing non-existent names and a wide-open invitation to personation and fraud.’
Ms Roberts also said the council was aware of instances where people who were recorded on the Register as not being citizens of Ireland turned up to vote and presented an Irish passport to the presiding officer on duty.
‘ They would also have been turned away from the polling booth. I can say that Wicklow County Council pro-actively identified every elector in the system that was classified as not being an Irish citizen and wrote to them back in early April asking them to make contact if they were, in fact, Irish citizens. This initiative resulted in identifying some 150 new electors for the referendum and they were all issued polling cards in the normal way.’
The council is urging anyone who had a problem voting, or has a similar issue, to contact them immediately at franchise@ wicklowcoco.ie so that the matter can be investigated.
Deputy Stephen Donnelly said that the situation was ‘outrageous’ and that he had been in touch with the council on the lady’s behalf in the past week. He said that with human error being a factor, he has no complaint with the returning officer or the council, who applied the law. He said, however that the legislation must be changed to allow for such instances.