Current System

The arrangements for electoral administration in Northern Ireland are different from elsewhere in the UK. The system in Northern Ireland is administered centrally by a Chief Electoral Officer with the support of the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (EONI). The Chief Electoral Officer is both the Returning Officer and Registration Officer in Northern Ireland.

The Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 was introduced primarily to overcome perceptions of electoral fraud which had existed in Northern Ireland for many decades. It replaced household registration with a system of annual individual registration. Under this system, each eligible elector was required to complete a registration form on an annual basis and include personal identifiers in the form of date of birth, National Insurance Number and signature. The individual form includes a declaration that the applicant has been resident in Northern Ireland for the whole of the three month period preceding 15 October of the year in which the application is being made. Information regarding other addresses at which the applicant is or has applied to be registered is also required. In line with the rest of the UK details of nationality must also be provided.

The Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2006 replaces the annual canvass with a system of continuous registration, whereby electors will register only once and will only have to re-register if their details change. Individual registration will be retained under the system of continuous registration. The Act does however allow for a canvass to be undertaken every 10 years, or as deemed necessary.

The Chief Electoral Officer has the power to request information for the purposes of maintaining the electoral register. Failure to provide this information or providing false information can result in a fine of up to £1,000. Eligibility to register is based largely on three factors:

• You must be over 18 years of age or over, or become 18 during the life of the register (usually on or before 30 November of the year following that of publication in December).
• You must be a British, Irish, Commonwealth citizen, or a citizen of a member state of the European Union.
• You must have been resident in Northern Ireland during the whole of the three-month period prior to the relevant date of 15 October.

In addition, members of the armed forces and other public servants who are stationed overseas can register at their home address. British citizens resident abroad are eligible to register in the constituency where they last registered before they left the UK, provided this was not more than 15 years ago.

The additional personal data gathered as part of the registration process does not appear on the published register of electors. However it will be used to check the identity of the voter when they apply to vote by post or proxy. The date of birth may be checked when the voter applies for a ballot paper at the polling station.

By law a revised version of the Northern Ireland Electoral Register must be published by 1 December each year. From December 2002 the Electoral Office has maintained two versions of the electoral register: the full version and the edited version.

The Future

The annual canvass is resource intensive and is viewed as diverting resources away from those groups less likely to register (for example, young people, ethnic minorities and people with learning disabilities) and so the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2006 has replaced the annual canvass with a system of continuous registration supported by a full canvass at least every ten years. The aim of this approach is, without increasing the resource requirements of electoral administration, to maintain the accuracy thus far achieved and obtain the completeness that the register may currently lack.

The Electoral Office of Northern Ireland aim to maintain accuracy of the register, in the absence of an annual canvass, through proactive management of the register including various mechanisms that capture changes to registrants' data. For example, a statutory instrument will be utilised to access other public sector information, such as that held by housing associations and schools, which can be compared to the register, while it will also be possible to rely on the activities of other organisations such as the Royal Mail redirection service, and the work of solicitors and job centres. This data matching will not result in immediate changes to the register but rather will act as a starting point for the Electoral Office of Northern Ireland to prompt people to up-date their details or to investigate any discrepancies.

The Electoral Commission will support this approach through the advertising of continuous registration more generally. It is accepted that a new mindset will need to be created whereby the majority of the population in Northern Ireland, who have always previously responded to the annual canvass, will keep their registration details up to date as a matter of routine.

EONI will seek to drive up completeness through a variety of mechanisms to target hard-to-reach groups. In particular, direct involvement with schools will be utilised to register 'attainers' who have reached the eligible age. The Electoral Commission will support completeness through targeted advertising such as that aimed at foreign language speakers.

An assessment of the register, to monitor the completeness and accuracy of a statistical sample in the absence of a full canvass, is to be carried out on an annual basis.