Far from using the 2002 census last week . . . as he and other ministers claimed both in and outside the Dail to reject our assertion that the register remains overstated by close to half a million . . . we actually used the CSO projections for 2007. With the figures now available from all the county councils, we stand over our assessment and are happy to explain how we arrived at it.

The adult population . . . and this is agreed by the minister . . . is 3.135m. However, from this figure has to be subtracted the 280,000 non-Irish and nonBritish nationals who are not eligible to vote in a general election, giving a total of 2.855m people eligible to vote. However, the Dail register of electors . . . the most relevant figure given that the general election is next year . . . is 2.982m. That means a minimum of 127,000 people too many on the register.

But this is not the full story.

This surplus assumes every single person eligible to vote is registered. That simply cannot be the case. In Northern Ireland, a centralised, computerised register was built from scratch after calling at every address twice a year and using their equivalent of the PPS number to avoid people being on the register more than once.

After four years of effort, a registration level of 89% was achieved.

Even assuming the same level has been achieved here . . . a highly unlikely scenario . . . it would mean that 89% of 2,855m people eligible to vote are on the register, suggesting that the Dail electoral register should be around 2.54m, not 2.982m as it is on the new draft register. This means that there are about 442,000 too many on the draft register.

This is a significant reduction since the Sunday Tribune launched this campaign 18 months ago and Minister Roche deserves credit for responding to this newspaper's investigation. However, it falls far short of the claims made by the minister. His claim that 97.5% of adults are on the draft register would be a world first. In reality, that figure is obtained by dividing the number of people on the total draft register by the number of adults in the country. But this takes no account of people being on the register more than once, which is clearly the case, and totally ignores our analysis above.

We challenge the minister and his officials to actually examine the draft register and count how many addresses are missing from each street, road and estate. It is also obvious there are tens of thousands of people on the register multiple times. Furthermore, from the furore last week, it is clear there are many who should be on it, but have been deleted.

The massive potential for electoral fraud still exists as those who deliberately put themselves on the register more than once can still not be identified. The result of next year's general election remains open to manipulation.