Through no fault of the county councils, their efforts were doomed from the beginning. Eighteen months ago, the Sunday Tribune revealed that there were some 800,000 more people on the electoral register than were entitled to vote.

This newspaper called for measures to correct the situation and ensure that the outcome of the forthcoming general election would not be compromised by the fraudulent casting of votes.

Despite belated guarantees in the Dail by both the Taoiseach and the environment minister, Dick Roche, that measures would be put in place to resolve the problem (the government's first reaction was to try to dismiss the Sunday Tribune's findings), the publication of the draft register last week shows clearly that, not only has government failed to correct the original problem but, astonishingly, it has created a second difficulty.

Firstly, the measures have failed to make serious inroads into removing people who should not be on the register. Our analysis of the new draft register indicates that a minimum of 500,000 people are still on the register who should not be on it. To make matters worse, the attempts to address the huge overstating of the register have resulted in the removal from it of many people who were legitimately on the voter database in the first place.

The original Sunday Tribune investigation in June 2005 showed that every county had more people registered than were entitled to vote, and figures compiled from the individual county councils last week reveal that this is still the case. For example, Cork now has 360,635 people registered to vote at Dail elections, yet there are only 328,000 people aged 18 or over in the county, and it should be borne in mind that international experience shows us that you will never get every registered adult to vote.

That situation is mirrored across the entire country. Donegal has at least 17,000 people too many on its register, Wexford has 15,000, Louth 15,000, Kerry 12,000 and both Meath and Kildare have a minimum of 5,000. This is despite the fact that Meath removed 20,000 people from its register and Kildare removed some 12,000.

This disparity between the number of people on the register and the numbers entitled to vote is certain to become more evident in coming weeks. The councils have until 25 November to add the names of those who should not be excluded and it is anticipated that significant numbers of people will be reregistered when they realise they have been removed.

It does seem the guidelines issued to city and county councils by the Department of Environment have largely been followed, but there is evidence of inconsistency in implementation among the councils. In some cases, if there was no one at home when the council official called, and there was no response to a subsequent letter, people were removed from the register, while in other cases, in exactly the same circumstances, people were kept on it.

This opens up the appalling vista of tens of thousands of people turning up on polling day early summer next year to discover that they have no vote for the first time in many years.

There are one-and-a-quarter million people aged 50 and over in the country and the vast majority of them have been registered to vote for all their adult lives. Many have voted in the same room in the same polling station for 40 years or more, yet it seems certain a proportion of these people have been removed from the register because they were not at home when an official called and they didn't foresee the consequences of not dealing with correspondence urging them to contact their county council to register.

The starting point for any drawing up of a register of electors must be the realisation that most voters will assume they are already included and will not pay much attention to the register until the day they go to vote. It is not realistic to expect three million people to check that they have a vote over the next three weeks, yet after 25 November, those excluded from the register will have to go to considerable trouble to get back on it. Despite the attempts by officialdom to put the onus on the public to register, the responsibility for this mess lies in the negligence and incompetence of the Department of Environment over many years.

The prospect of thousands turning up to vote next summer only to find they are excluded from the register, added to the inevitability of hundreds of thousands of polling cards being incorrectly issued, is a recipe for chaos on election day.

It is also clear from the analysis of the draft register that many people are still on the register more than once. This is not the fault of the city and county councils. While they were mandated to implement the "new measures", they were asked to do it with one hand tied behind their backs. With limited resources, they are expected to carry out a job that required 4,000 enumerators in the census last April. They also have no way of determining if someone on their register is also registered at another address. The only way of doing this would be to use each citizen's PPS number as a unique identifier to ensure no one is registered more than once, but the government has resisted calls for this measure to be introduced.

It is clear from opinion polls that the next election will be a close contest. The winning of the final seat in most constituencies will be determined by relatively few votes. In 2002, in 40% of the constituencies, the final seat was won by fewer than 400 votes, and by fewer than 100 votes in half of those.

Next year, the final outcome in many constituencies, particularly Dublin, Meath and Kildare, will be settled by a handful of votes. Most political commentators believe this is where the election will be decided. Yet the outcome may well hinge on a lack of votes from people who should be entitled to vote, and votes cast by people who shouldn't have them.

There is still time to reduce the risk. The input of the 4,000 enumerators, promised in the Dail last May by the Taoiseach, should be activated immediately and every house revisited before the final publication of the register in February 2007.

Radical measures are called for . . . the importance of an accurate register demands that. It is now clearly too late to implement a system that uses the PPS number to ensure that people vote only once. To guarantee that the next government is democratically elected, it may even now be necessary to stamp voters' hands. While there are those of us who abhor the use of what might be regarded as a third-world measure, it is the consequence of having a third-world system for compiling our electoral register.

Minister Roche has had ample time to get this right. The evidence from last week's draft register of electors is that he has failed miserably.

With just seven months to an election, he and the government have one last chance to correct the register. They cannot afford to fail again.