The DOBlog

Electoral Data Quality…. a follow up bloggage.

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Daragh

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I did a quick search on the very nice http://www.tribune.ie/ (a lot nicer than what they had a while ago, so nice I could almost excuse the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly blurb at the top) to see what sort of writing they had been doing on the electoral register issue. The link to my search results is here. There are 33 results.

When you weed out the results that relate to those bastions of functioning democracy Zimbabwe (rock on Mugabe) and the US (don’t get me started…) and other foreign turfs there are 13 stories going back to 2002 that would be of relevance.

 The VAST majority of these relate to a crisis in the electoral register – which the Tribune described as such back on the 19th of June 2005.

Here’s the links to the various stories for your delight and delication. You will need to register to read them, but it is free for 30 days.

 Fears of fraud as vote register out by 800,000 (19th of June 2005)

The flaws in the electoral register that threaten our democracy (19 JUNE 2005)  

Government must act to avoid vote fraud (19 June 2005)

Election chaos: ‘I was on register twice’, says Fiona O’Malley TD (19 June 2005)

Electoral register wide open to abuse (15th October 2005)

Electoral register out by 860,000 (26 February 2006)

Shambolic electoral register must be reformed (26 FEBRUARY 2006) 

The 800,000 opportunities for voter fraud need to be sorted now (05 March 2006)

Inaccurate register ‘suits government’, Labour TD suggests (19 March 2006)

And these are just from the FIRST Page…..

One from a later page on the search is

100,000 may not be eligible to vote (02 May 2004)

Which suggests that if you sum up the overstatement and the understatement, there is a bigger problem again!

Write/email your local Councillors and TDs (especially the ones from the government parties). Ask them what is going on. Make it clear to them that the current state of the Electoral Register does not meet or exceed your expectations as a citizen – that it is simply NOT acceptable quality and that a managed approach to ensuring the total quality of our electoral register is needed to help restore faith in our democracy.

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