The new draft Register of Electors, which will form the basis of the register of voters in next year's general election, was published on Wednesday.

A Sunday Tribune investigation has established that although the register is still overstated by at least half a million voters, there is considerable evidence that many people who should be on the register have been removed as local authorities followed strict guidelines laid down by the Department of Environment.

Environment minister Dick Roche yesterday admitted that "some inadvertent deletions" have been made from the register, although the Sunday Tribune understands that the figure will run into tens of thousands. Labour's environment spokesman Eamon Gilmore yesterday said he had received reports of this happening in a number of areas across the country. People who have "always been on the register don't realise the intention to remove them if they don't respond to letters sent to them, " he said, predicting there would be "chaos and a lot of anger" on polling day.

"It's a mess and it's a mess of the government's making, " Gilmore said, adding that this could have been avoided if the government had used the opportunity presented by last April's census to create a new, clean electoral register.

The crisis in the electoral register was first revealed in the Sunday Tribune last year when it was established that it was overstated by up to 800,000 voters. The government resisted calls for a new centralised and computerised voter database and instead gave extra funding and new guidelines to local authorities to try to address the problem.

However, the figures in Wednesday's draft register confirm that these measures have failed. The Sunday Tribune analysed figures in threequarters of the country's county councils and, in every county examined, there are more people on the electoral register than there are adult voters. It is estimated that there are still more than 500,000 people on the register who should not be there.

This suggests that the practice of individuals being on the register at a number of different addresses is still widespread, leaving the potential for electoral fraud.

The new guidelines have resulted in hundreds of thousands of names being removed from the register, but there is considerable evidence that in many cases the wrong names have been removed. Local councils have posted out tens of thousands of letters informing people they have been removed from the draft register and asking them to contact them, before the register is completed on 25 November, if they should be reinstated. They are expecting that many of these people will be re-instated over the coming weeks. However, the worry is that many people who have been on the register for years will not understand that they have been removed and will be unable to vote unless they make contact with their local authority.