Elderly residents ‘terribly upset’ by Wexford County Council letters aimed at cleaning up register of electors

By Simon Bourke, Wexford People

Elderly residents in Co Wexford have been left “terribly upset” by letters telling them they will be removed from the register of electors unless they provide further details. Raising the issue at the February meeting of Wexford County Council (WCC), Councillor Barbara Anne Murphy said the letters had arrived without warning and had caused consternation for some of their recipients.

“The letters were sent without any advance publicity whatsoever, people are being told their names will be removed if they don’t respond within two weeks,” said Cllr Murphy. “Is this part of a national campaign? They’re terribly upset at the prospect of their names being removed from the register. This is desperately unfair.”

However, due to people being registered at multiple addresses across Co Wexford and beyond, the local council is attempting to “clean up the register” and remove all duplicate accounts. It will only remove someone from the register if, after making contact three times, it does not receive a response.

“We are contacting 35,000 people, we are doing it incrementally because dealing with those responses is a huge workload,” said county secretary Michael Drea. “We have to make contact with someone three times before we can legally remove them from the register, it’s not a case that if they don’t reply to one letter they’re removed.

“We are asking people to confirm their addresses because it is the responsibility of the individual to ensure they are only on the register of electors at their current address. Clearly that is not the case nationally. When we get to elections we’re getting a lower turnout than we should, and this is due to people being registered at multiple addresses. We’re trying to get to a stage where we have as accurate a register as possible.”

The issue, according to Cllr Murphy, is that many of those receiving the letters feared they were potentially the subject of a scam and that they were reluctant to provide details like their Personal Public Service (PPS) number via post. She received support from Cllr Pip Breen who said he’d been contacted by people who were “wary” of the letters and didn’t know whether to “go the guards or not".

“We’re trying to manage this,” replied Mr Drea. “The letter they’re receiving is to make them aware of it. We’re doing it in tranches of two thousand letters because we don’t want 35,000 responses coming back at the same time. We currently use checktheregister.ie and we’re moving to voter.ie, it’s a far better platform, as part of that we are carrying out data cleansing work and have identified 35,000 people we need to write to and request information from.”

Having received one of the letters herself, Cllr Vicky Barron said “it wasn't threatening” and that your PPS number is “not sensitive data”.