This is not the fault of the local authorities, who have made very genuine efforts to call to homes across the state in an attempt to correct a register that has been a mess for the last three decades. However, their job was an impossible one. With so many homes empty for much of the day, it was always going to be an enormous challenge. And crucially, the inability of councils to check if a person was on the register more than once meant the problem was never going to be tackled without more radical measures.

It has been clear since June 2005, when the Sunday Tribune first revealed that the database could be overstated by around 800,000 voters, that what is needed is a computerised system in which every citizen's PPS number is used to ensure they can only be on the register once. This is the system used in Northern Ireland.

The government resisted calls for this reform. It also refused to consider the common-sense idea of using last April's census of population to create a new, clean electoral register. However, criticism of their approach must be tempered by the knowledge that this problem has existed, and been ignored by successive governments, for decades. Roche, by issuing new guidelines to local authorities and increasing their funding for work on the register, is the first person who has sought to address the problem after long neglect.

It should be clear now that the responsibility for compiling and maintaining the electoral register must be taken from local authorities and granted to a new statutory electoral commission with responsibility for creating a centralised database of voters.

Obviously, there is not enough time to do this before the general election. Therefore, in the short term, the government's efforts must focus on minimising the potential for fraud on election day. There is nothing it can do now about the half a million plus polling cards that will be sent out erroneously, but there are things it can do to ensure that those polling cards are not used fraudulently.

In recent elections, detection measures at polling stations have been wholly inadequate. Guidelines that one-in-four voters should be asked for ID have not been observed. That must change and if it requires retired gardaí being drafted in to man polling stations - as suggested by Roche - then so be it.

The integrity of our democracy demands that a series of very strict election-day detection measures are put in place for next May.