In a story that is bound to bring tears to the eyes of at least one regular contributor to on-line discussions about information quality, news reaches us from Jan Erik Ingvaldsen of a series of information quality disasters in the Danish EU elections which take place on Sunday.
Denmark is also holding a referendum on the same day, which some are viewing as a root cause for these problems.
Here is the story in Danish (big thank you to Jan Erik for this link via twitter)
Here is a rough translation in Google English. As google’s machine translations are never 100% accurate, we’d welcome any links to this story in English.
The problems (as we can make them out from the translation)
- In Ikast-Brande, a municipality of 1700 people, voters received polling cards directing them to the wrong polling stations (wrong people, wrong ballot boxes)
- In Stvens, the polling station is correct (right people going to the right ballot box), but the address given for the polling station is wrong.
- In Vejle the wrong zip code was included in the map of the electoral district (i.e. people entitled to vote in a given polling station)
- 2700 voters in three constituencies have been instructed to vote in two different locations
- Some voters who are entitled to vote in both the Referendum and the EU Parliament elections have only received polling cards for one of the two ballots
- Some postal voters report that they have not received any information on the candidates running in the area their vote is being counted in.
Danish speaker – please correct my listing of the problem (admitting your problems is the first step on the road to recovery).
Jan Erik Ingvaldsen has a great post which summarises the problems in English.
Despite all of this, some elections commentators say that the preparations for the election are good, and they will sort out the problems when the complaints come in. Hanging Chads anyone?
While the fact that the Danes are running an EU election and a referendum on the same day, with different voter eligibility rules for each, goes some way to explaining the challenges that might have contributed to these problems, the defence is weakened by the fact that Ireland is running two ballots as well this week for EU Parliament elections and Local Government Councils and has not had reports of similar problems (yet).
Of course, the problem in Ireland is that our electoral register is wonderfully inaccurate.
For the impact that poor quality information can have on democratic processes, the view that the errors and impact can be “inspected out”, and because investigating this story made me have to figure out Google’s attempts at translation, this is being classed as a definite IQ Trainwreck.
Also, as Jan Erik points out in his blog, if this was happening in a South American or African nation there would be widespread media outcry.
Thanks to Jan Erik (@jeric40 on twitter) for flagging this one to our attention.
Oh yes, after hubris comes nemesis.
I have earlier written about how problems with US and Irish voter registration could be solved by using the Danish citizen administration practice, where each citizen has one unique ID used for all citizen roles including election.
But what does it help when that unique identified person is misguided to the wrong or not existing polling station.
Having solved one data quality issue does not exclude other issues to either show up or become the talk of the town.
Henrik
Indeed, this does go to show that even the best designed processes can be subject to unexpected failures.
I think it is fair to say that the Danish system is very good at identifying who should be voting, but perhaps needs a bit of work with the part that tells those people where to vote.
This highlights the fact that all information needs to be considered in the context of an end to end process and that quality can really only be determined if the desired outcome (in this case right voter, right place, right ballots) can be achieved.