The background

An Irish Sunday Newspaper broke the story in 2006 that there were up to 860,000 more people registered to vote in the Irish Republic than actually lived there. To put that in perspective, the number of persons resident in Ireland who were of an age to vote was only approximately 2.6 million or so. This represented a significant issue.

The approach of the Irish Government to the issue was to dispatch personnel to go door to door checking voter registrations. This was a form of scrap and rework. It was conducted over a period of approximately 3 months in late 2006. The work practices involved in this review varied betweenlocal government areas . In the electoral constituency of the Minister for the Environment (who has ultimate responsiblity for the Electoral Register) at least one entire housing estate (of a few hundred houses) ‘disappeared’ off the Electoral Register.

The litany of issues is too long to go into here… check out my personal blog site for some more background.

Why is this a trainwreck?

There are a variety of reasons why this is an Information Quality Trainwreck:

1. It has a fundamental effect on a key process in democracy.
2. It would appear that divergent processes, poorly defined processes and a failure to define and manage processes in a way that reflect ‘life events’ that might change the electoral register was part of the root cause for the problem.
3. There was a focus on scrap and rework to address the issue. There has been no substantive or tangible official review of the root causes for these problems. There are some anecdotes however of Electoral Register clerks in some parts of the country using the Obituary pages from local papers to identify people to be taken off the Register as they didn’t know that there was a central register of Deaths who could provide them that information.
4. The ‘tone from the top’ was one of creating fear and spreading blame. The Government Minister in charge berated local authorities for not doing a good enough job. However it seems that there was a fundamental failure to provide the local authorities with the tools and processes they needed to do that job.

Current State

In Ireland we are less than a month away from a General Election. Our Electoral Register is now known to be flawed and innaccurate. The root causes have not been addressed and whatever ‘clean-up’ was achieved through the manual scrap and rework will have degraded as it is now over 6 months old.

The information does not meet or exceed our expectation and there is a fundamental risk to the quality of our elections.