One of the few things I can recall from my business classes in secondary school is the phrase E&OE, which stands for "errors and omissions excepted".
It was drummed into us by our teacher (nicknamed 'Bubbles') that it's a handy legal disclaimer, in which a business can indicate that information contained in a quotation isn't necessarily 100% accurate.
Ireland's electoral register should have "E&OE" emblazoned on the front page in vivid red letters because it's riddled with errors and omissions.
The truth is that we don't even know the extent of the errors, but UCC's Dr Theresa Reidy thinks it could contain - at the very least - the names of 300,000 people who are entitled to vote but shouldn't be.
And this isn't news.
Back in 2016, the Oireachtas Environment Committee estimated the register of electors listed the names of almost 500,000 people more than it should have.
A similar assessment of the 2007 election found that over 600,000 more names were on the register than should have been recorded.
Clearly, Ireland has a problem.
The entity charged with trying to clean-up the mess is An Coimisiún Toghcháin, the independent electoral commission which was established two years ago.
This week it produced a 190-page report - Oversight Report on the Electoral Registers - which it hopes will be the beginning of the end of Ireland's dodgy electoral register.
Its eloquent Chief Executive Art O'Leary put his hands-up at the beginning of the news conference and said that while the commission was publishing a "monster of a report", it can't yet provide an accurate figure on exactly how many names are on the register that shouldn't be there.
"We just don't know," he said, adding that the best guess is in the region of "hundreds of thousands".
There are three main reasons why we have a bloated voter register.
Duplication is a clear problem, with voters still being registered to vote at their original family home even though they no longer live there.
Emigration is another issue, as voters often neglect to remove their name from the electoral register before they depart the State.
The register contains the names of many people who are deceased.
The phrase 'electoral register' is, in fact, a misnomer.
There are 31 individual electoral registers, all of which are maintained by local authorities.
While the registers of Dublin’s four councils are interlinked, the others 'do not talk to each other', so to speak.
Small wonder that Art O'Leary said on Thursday that his Electoral Commission is "deeply concerned at the state of the register right now".
We should all be concerned.
My eagle-eyed colleague Juliette Gash pointed out to me that 11 of our local authorities have more people on their electoral registers than the total number of their eligible voters!
These are: Sligo (111.8%), Donegal (107.5%), Leitrim (106.2%), Longford (105.3%), Monaghan (104.1%), Galway county (101.8%), Cork county (101.4%), Westmeath (101.2%), Carlow (101%), Cavan (100.9%) and Mayo (100.4%).
This is skewing our election voter turnout data.
Official voter turnout at the Local, European and General Elections last year was "definitely wrong", according to Mr O'Leary.
He suggested that turnout at elections may be 5% higher than official figures show.
Over the years, there have been sporadic attempts to, what's termed, "clean-up" the electoral register.
One effort undertaken by then Environment minister Dick Roche back in 2007 almost resulted in RTÉ Political Correspondent Mícheál Lehane being deprived of the chance to cast his own ballot when he moved from Cahersiveen to live in Dublin.
What's now being mooted by the Electoral Commission is the most comprehensive attempt yet to put order on this chaotic situation.
The commission wants audits to be undertaken of every electoral register in the country; an agreed standard for accuracy to be adopted by local authorities; and a national awareness campaign.
Substantial change is already under way, we’re told, as the Department of Housing and Local Government is compiling a single national electoral register, which is due to be completed by Autumn 2026.
On the Electoral Commission's wish-list is the hope that local authorities also compile what's termed ‘accuracy indicators’ to improve the register.
That means voters signing up to the register by providing their PPS numbers, dates of birth and their Eircode.
The commission said: "There is a clear correlation between low levels of accuracy indicators and apparently high registration rates."
That said, the Electoral Commission also indicated that funding was an issue for many local authorities, stating that the level of resourcing is "far from sufficient to deal with the tasks required".
Perhaps anticipating this finding, Minister James Browne announced earlier this week that €3 million will be made available to local authorities this year for the modernisation project.
Asking voters to provide one branch of government with personal details - such as a PPSN - which had been issued by another branch of government, shouldn't cause too many problems - one would have thought.
However, asking the public to hand over personal data could become an issue, though that hasn’t happened so far.
The accuracy of the register is only one part of the Electoral Commission’s work.
It's also interested in ‘completeness’ - that is, ensuring the name of everyone who is entitled to vote is on the electoral register.
But achieving that objective seems to be some way down the road.
Art O'Leary told us: "It will not be possible to estimate the completeness until the issue of accuracy is addressed."
Given the scale of the accuracy problem, that's going to take some time.
The Electoral Commission has a workflow timeline stretching to 2029.
Mr O'Leary was asked if there might be an easier way: close down the electoral register and give voters a two-year deadline to re-register with accuracy indicators.
Mr O'Leary said he felt local authorities had the power and knowledge to correct the register, without going for such a nuclear option.
However, he didn’t rule it out completely.
Mr O’Leary also appealed to the public to return any invalid polling cards which may have mistakenly been sent by their local authority.
He said he had done that himself a few months back when polling cards arrived at his own home which were designated for the previous owners.
Back in 2016, the Oireachtas Committee examining the problems surrounding the electoral register expressed concern that it could be a "significant opportunity" for electoral fraud.
But this isn’t a concern the Electoral Commission shares, with Mr O'Leary emphatic that there is "no evidence" to suggest that politicians or their teams are taking advantage of the problem.
Readers with a long memory might recall the case of Pat O’Connor, the Charles Haughey loyalist and election agent, who was accused in 1982 of voting in two separate polling stations in the Dublin North constituency in a General Election.
The case was dismissed by the District Court, but its memory lives on, with the accused being referred to thereafter as ‘Pat O’Connor Pat O’Connor’.
While clearly, we have too many names on our electoral registers, removing a name is no easy task.
Local authorities are required to make up to three attempts to make contact with an individual.
We learned that some council staff are even checking up on RIP.ie and tuning into local radio death notices.
The commission’s head of electoral operations, Tim Carey, said such notices don't result in a person's name being crossed off the register. But, he said, the information can offer indications that the official has identified the correct person.
If all this wasn't bizarre enough, we were reminded that prior to 2022, there wasn’t an obligation on an individual to register their own details - prospective voters could get their mammy to do it for them by post.
This lacuna led to some wags taking the opportunity to place the name of their cats and dogs on the electoral register.
Luna Cunningham has yet to cast her ballot.
‘E&OE’ indeed.
