Of course, to a great extent the local zeitgeist is missing the point about Obama’s win. It was not just the technology and the interactions via the web that got him elected. It was the very carefully planned and executed gathering of information about people and their interactions with the party and with the democratic process that helped guide strategy and drive the ‘machine’ to get people out and get them voting. Obama used the technology as a tool to ensure timely and actionable information that drove effective communication. Any idiot can set up a blog (hoisted by my own petard I think here), but mass engagement on a massively personal level requires high quality data so that you can execute your plan and achieve your objectives.

It’s just the same with businesses – the technology is one part of the equation, the people issues and the focus on the information is the magic essential that makes it all work. To put it another way, all the plumbing in the world won’t make nice tea if your water is full of effluent.

As I’m currently working with the IAIDQ to improve our web presence and get more active in having conversations with members and potential members via Twitter I decided to take a quick look around what the main parties in Ireland are doing thus far from the point of view of figuring out what the quality of their data might be and what their challenges probably are. I was also inspired by Graham Rhind’s post over on DataQualityPro.com about web data capture. My main area of focus is the ’sign up’ pages for each of the parties as this is the opportunity to find out up front what people are interested in.

For full disclosure, I am a paid up member of one of these parties but rest assured I’ll put the boot in fairly.

Labour (Labour.ie)

My first thoughts looking at this page are *uurrgh – free text* Free text fields are not a good indicator of potential quality data.

They’ve sensibly made your Given Name and Family Names (unfortunately called First name and surname here) and email and postal address fields manadatory. There is validation on the email address, which recognises “.info” as a valid domain (halleluijah – the number of sites that STILL don’t validate .info is horrendous).

However, the party has opted to capture postal addresses in a big free text blob. Oh dear. This would suggest to me that either:

1. They have back office processes to parse and standardise this data so it can be used effectively to target members by constituency
2. They reformat addresses on an ad hoc basis as required by manually rekeying

Either of these options adds cost and reduces the effectiveness of the information captured. Analysis of the data will take longer as it will need to be reformatted and cleansed each time (unless there is an ongoing scrap and rework process in the background). It doesn’t take too much extra effort from a coding point of view to put some basic structure on the addresses as people enter them.

The registration page also asks you for your areas of interest in the party and politics. This is a single free text field with just one line of text available. OGG (as Charlie Brown would say if he was a tweenager today – “oh good grief”). How precisely do Labour quickly align people with issues and campaigns? Is this field linked to some sort of parsing process (automated or human driven) where this information is processed out? Does this affect their speed to respond to members and pick up people with skills they might be able to use? What speed to react advantage might they be losing out on here?

Let’s not dwell on this much further only to ask why they haven’t taken advantage of capturing the mobile phone number to ask if they can sms you as well as email you?

DOBlog ranking: Not great. Great scope for improvement with some proper planning and execution.

Fine Gael (Finegael.ie)

OK, this one looks a little more promising. At least the postal address field is broken out into more than one text field. Oh… hang on… no. I take

that back. Two text fields does not a structure make. But at least they take the time to capture the constituency you want to be associated with (I didn’t see that on the Labour.ie site but may have missed it).

But again… *nggggaahhh* with the free text for fields that hold gold dust and gems of information about the people who are signing up for you. The comments I made about the Labour Party hold here as well. A colleague in the IAIDQ once shared the following mantra with me:

“Free text fields usually aren’t”

There is bound to be some structure or key things that the party wants to find here. Surely they could break them out into a structured pick list to improve the quality of the information they have, not just the quantity of it?

DOBlog rating: Better than Labour but still a recipe for poor quality information.

The Green Party (Greenparty.ie)

Bob Dylan may have sang “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man”, but I was humming “How many links to I need to click to join the Green Party” there were so many clicks to get here. That said, once I got there, their registration form was not entirely disappointing from a data quality point of view.

For a start, they (alone out of all the political parties) avoided the trap of First Name/Surname which can bugger up data when dealing with cultures who put their family names first either all the time or when filling in forms (like Asian cultures, and some parts of Eastern Europe). The Greens went for a nice fudge of “first name” and “Family Name(s)” which is a step in the right direction.

They structured the address over two unstructured fields, with a drop down list for Counties and Dublin post codes and a nice special field for any members from foreign soils who actually have post codes (co-incidentally the Government Minister currently responsible for the non-introduction of postcodes in Ireland is a member of the Green Party). This small investment in structure means that (hopefully, if they haven’t burgered up the backend on this) the Green Party are able to very easily slice and dice their membership data to see where they have ‘boots on the ground’ and where they might be exposed. Basic, but good.

They also capture information about an applicant’s country of origin/nationality, but with out saying WHY they want to know that. Not an information quality issue per se, but I’d question whether that question might result in excessive information for the stated purpose in the context of Data Protection. As this is a required field I would suspect that people who object to answering the question might fudge the answer. Bear in mind that many immigrant communities might be fearful of giving detailed information about their origins to ostensible authority figures in a host country.

What they do well that none of the other parties looked at so far have done is to pick out some ‘hot button’ skill areas that they need bodies for and make them straightforward tick boxes so Green Party activists can raise their hands and take part in activities such as “monitoring the media” or canvassing. Again, this is structured data which would be straightforward to work with and allows the Green Party to make use of the information they are capturing. Free text is used just for stuff they haven’t thought of yet.

[updated]

DOBlog rating: There has been some clear planning here as to what information they need to capture and what uses they would like to put it to, as opposed to a desire to have summat on d’interweb. There probably needs to be some greater clarification on what some of the information is to be used for which might contribute to improving quality. Otherwise a good effort. Having thought about it again in the context of Graham Rhind’s comment below, I’ve downgraded the Greens to “good planning, shame about the execution”.

Fianna Fail (fiannafail.ie)

Fianna Fail made a big deal earlier in the year of getting a company who had done the technology piece for Obama to rejig their website. Well done. So I was eager to see how the site’s registration page reflected the obvious intense and intent learnings that would have come from the US company’s involvement.

Hmmm… first off, the site looks clean and snazzy. The zen of data capture is clear here, with only items that are required being requested and lots of whitespace. Mandatory fields abound.

Gone is the land line phone number (sure we have more mobiles than people in this country), reducing the amount of fields you have to fill in. Emphasis is placed on the email address as the means of contact. The postal address is structured into:

• Two general address lines (good)
• A city (ooookkkkkayyy)
• A postcode (ehhh… guys?)
• A country.

WTF… what about COUNTIES? And City and Postcode are mandatory fields. If one assumes that City= County then you find yourself faced with a free text field for Counties and cities. So “Co. Test” should kick out on the validation, surely. It doesn’t.

Likewise there is no validation on the telephone number and you are told to put in “N/A” instead of putting in a post code (did somebody forget we don’t have them? It is simply NOT good practice from an information quality point of view to FORCE people to create poor quality information that you then have to go and clean later on. I can imagine the analysis now “Jeez, we’ve got to get moving on the people in postcode N/A – there’s lots of interest in us there”).

The process then (very cleverly) prompts you to sign up a friend… I bailed out at that point.

No effort made (at that point in the lifecycle of a FF member) to find out if they know anything or can do anything of use to the party.

10/10 for slick and shiny web presences, with the usual suspects of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube featuring in the footer of the site, but I would question the quality of the information that would exist on the database behind this site and its ultimate effectiveness in driving a smart and information-enabled election campaign.

DOBlog rating: Very poor. They seem to have spent money to reinvent their web presence and sexify it without thinking for a second about the quality of the information they are going to need to capture and use.

Conclusion

The Greens, surprisingly, are the most astute in terms of how they have designed their membership sign up form to capture information they can quickly use to effectively engage with people from their database. Yes, FF may have a cunning plan involving Twitter and such like, but the Greens are the only party that could, on the basis of their registration pages, run a query and find 100 people willing to canvas in the Dublin 5 area.

Labour and Fine Gael have a way to go but with some decent planning and an information quality centered approach to that planning and execution of that plan they could improve greatly.

Fianna Fail are a disappointment. Very basic mistakes, in my view, create a web form that is confusing for the person trying to register and results in plain crappy data on the back end. Unless they have spent even more cash on the back end to undo the duffing up of their data.

With the focus coming more and more on how political parties can engage with their contituencies and secure votes using Internet based technologies, there is a risk that the political zeitgeist will get caught up in the technology and lose focus on the most important element required to win elections – Information on who your constituents are, what matters to them, and how they can help you help them most effectively. Everything else is just plumbing that helps you make use of that information in a more timely (and perhaps more automated) manner. But if the quality of the information is poor, through poor design and poor planning of information capture, then the investment and effort involved will not be justified come election day.

Information Quality is, ultimately, a measure of how well the information enables a knowledge worker (a party worker, a constituency activist, a head office strategist) to achieve their objectives. Having looked at how our political parties currently gather information on their members, there are grounds for concern in most about the ability of their information to meet their expectations without heroic efforts from backroom staff to reformat, cleanse, and repurpose that information.

It’s the information, stupid.

The Houdini Project that his team ran has highlighted the value of information, and especially good quality and timely information, when making decisions or trying to gain a competitive advantage. From the details that have leaked out (and while Newsweek get the credit for breaking the story, I found it discussed here a few days ago) it is clear that from the top down there was an understanding of the value of timely and accurate data with additional ‘richness’ of information to help focus resources (ie not calling people who’d already voted or who weren’t going to vote Obama), prioritise effort (ie putting the priority on calling in areas where voter turn out was lower than expected), and generally just getting the edge on the opposition.

On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:

We were plugged in to the GOTV operation throughout the day, and we knew that it was working, that what we were doing mattered.

Ironically, only yesterday I was delivering a presentation on how information quality professionals needed to work with their customers (stakeholders) to make that link between the goals and priorities of the Executive Committee and the actions, deeds and drivers of the people in the front line to give a clear and coherent alignment of information quality to strategy (and vice versa).

The IAIDQ has issued a press release commenting on the value of the information to the success of Obama’s campaign.

As more information emerges about how the Houdini project worked, I’m sure either the IAIDQ or I will be writing more about it.

This dance was brought to mind yesterday when Fergal of the Tuppenceworth bloggers emailed me to let me know that he appears to have been taken off the Electoral Register in his home county. Again.

You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic in.
You put your right to self-determination and election of a government by proportional representation as mandated by the constititution of the Irish Republic out.
In. Out. In. Out.
And you shake it all about.

It would seem that Fergal had been taken off the Register during the Great Clean up of 2006. He then had his ballot reinstated. The other day, in a fit of electoral existentialism he decided to try and find himself on the Electoral Register website www.checktheregister.ie

Zen like, he found himself encountering the concept of nothing as a search for his name at his address revealed nothing. Oh Hokey Cokey Cokey indeed.

So what may have gone wrong here?

• Is Fergal’s name transposed on the Register (surname first, firstname last)?
• Is the address registered against Fergal on the Register different to his address?
• Does the search function on the Electoral Register require an exact character match on names/addresses? Is “Fergal” interpreted as a different name to “Fearghal” (both Fergals in my book)?
• If Fergal has indeed been deleted from the Register (again), what triggered the Hokey Cokey here? Was an old copy of the Register loaded to the website?
• Is the version you search on-line up to date with the version you might find in your library or Garda Station? Might Fergal be on the Register, but just not on the Register that is searched? Might it work in the contrary… Might people be listed as ‘on the register’ in an on-line search but be off the Register in the ‘paper’ world (ie the version that counts on polling day)?

The list of potential root causes is (especially as I am speculating a bit) quite long. However this is further evidence that the processes for the management of the Electoral Register are a bit knackered. This has been accepted by the Government and the Oireachtas Committee on the Electoral Register recently published a series of recommendations which eerily echoed comments and recommendations made on this blog over 2 years ago.

However, while there is an urgent need to have as accurate an electoral register as possible (1 Referendum in our immediate future and Local Elections in the not to distant future), care must be taken to ensure we solve the problems of tomorrow as well as the problems of today.

But in the words of Tom Jones – “I think I’m gonna dance now”…

“Oh, hokey cokey cokey…. Oh hokey cokey cokey…..”

A number of points raised in the article interest me, if for no other reason than they sound very familiar – more on that anon. Other interest me because they still run somewhat counter to the approach that is needed to finally resolve the issue.

I’ll start with the bits that run counter to the approach required. The Oireachtas Committee has been pretty much consistent in its application of the boot to Local Authorities as regards the priority they give to the management of the Electoral Register. According to the Irish Times article, the TDs and Senators found that:

“Running elections is not a core function of local authorities. Indeed, it is not a function that appears to demand attention every year. It can, therefore, be questioned if it gets the priority it warrants under the array of authorities”

I must humbly agree and disagree with this statement. By appearing to blame Local Authorities for the problem and for failing to prioritise the management of the Electoral Register, the Committee effectively absolves successive Ministers for the Environment and other elected officials from failing to ensure that this ‘information asset’ was properly maintained. Ultimately, all Local Authorities fall under the remit of the Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government. As the ’supreme being’ in that particular food chain, the Minister (and their department) is in a position to set policy, establish priorities and mandate adequate resourcing of any Local Authority function, from Water Services to Electoral Franchise.

The key issue is that Franchise section was not seen as important by anyone. A key information asset was not managed, no continual plans were put in place for the acquisition of information or the maintenance of information. Only when there were problems applying the information did anyone give a darn. This, unfortunately, is a problem that is not confined to Local Government and Electoral data however – a large number of companies world wide have felt the pain of failing to manage the quality of their information assets in recent times.

Failing to acknowledge that the lack of management priority was systemic and endemic within the entire hierarchy of Central and Local Government means that a group of people who probably tried to do their best with the resources assigned to them are probably going to feel very aggrieved. “The Register is buggered. It’s your fault. We’re taking it away from you” is the current message. Rather it should be “The system we were operating is broken. Collectively there was a failure to prioritise the management of this resource. The people tried to make it work, but best efforts were never enough. It needs to be replaced.”

W. Edward’s Deming advised people seeking to improve quality to ‘drive out fear’. A corollary of that is that one should not engage in blame when a system is broken unless you are willing to blame all actors in the system equally.

However, I’m equally guilty as I raised this issue (albeit not in as ‘blaming’ a tone) back in… oh 2006.:

“Does the current structure of Local Authorities managing Electoral Register data without a clear central authority with control/co-ordination functions (such as to build the national ‘master’ file) have any contribution to the overstatement of the Register?“

Moving on to other points that sound very familiar…

1. Errors are due to a “wide variety of practices” within Local Authorities. Yup, I recall writing about that as a possible root cause back in 2006. Here and here and here and here and here in fact.
2. The use of other data sources to supplement the information available to maintain the Register is one suggestion. Hmmm… does this sound like it covers the issue?

Could the Electoral Register process make use of a data source of people who are moving house (such as An Posts’s mail redirection service or newaddress.ie)? How can that be utilised in an enhanced process to manage & maintain the electoral register? These are technically surrogate sources of reality rather than being ‘reality’ itself, but they might be useful.

That’s from a post I wrote here on the 24th April 2006.

And then there’s this report, which was sent to Eamon Gilmore on my behalf and which ultimately found its way to Dick Roche’s desk while he was still the Minister in the DOELG. Pages 3 to 5 make interesting reading in light of the current proposals. Please note the negatives that I identified with the use of data from 3rd party organisations that would need to be overcome for the solution to be entirely practicable. These can be worked around with sound governance and planning, but bumbling into a solution without understanding the potential problems that would need to be addressed will lead to a less than successful implementation.

3. The big proposal is the creation of a ‘central authority’ to manage the Electoral Register. This is not new. It is simply a variation on a theme put forward by Eamon Gilmore in a Private Member’s Bill which was debated back in 2006 and defeated at the Second Stage(The Electoral Registration Commissioner Bill, 2005). This is a proposal that I also critiqued in the report that wound its way to Dick Roche… see pages 3 to 5 again. I also raise issues of management and management culture at page 11.
4. The use of PPS numbers is being considered but there are implications around Data Protection . Hmm… let’s see… I mentioned those issues in this post and in this post.

And it further assumes that the PPS Identity is always accurate (it may not be, particularly if someone is moving house or has moved house. I know of one case where someone was receiving their Tax Certs at the address they lived in in Dublin but when they went to claim something, all the paperwork was sent to their family’s home address down the country where they hadn’t lived for nearly 15 years.)

In my report in 2006 (and on this blog) I also discussed the PPS Number and the potential for fraud if not linked to some form of photographic ID given the nature of documents that a PPS number can be printed on in the report linked to above. This exact point was referenced by Senator Camillus Glynn at a meeting of the Committee last week


“I would not have a difficulty with using the PPS card. It is logical, makes sense and is consistent with what obtains in the North. The PPS card should also include photographic evidence. I could get hold of Deputy Scanlon’s card. Who is to say that I am not the Deputy if his photograph is not on the card? Whatever we do must be as foolproof as possible.”

This comment was supported by a number of other committee members.

So, where does that leave us? Just under two years since I started obsessively blogging about this issue, we’ve moved not much further than when I started. There is a lot of familiarity about the sound-bites coming out at present – to put it another way, there is little on the table at the moment (it seems) that was not contained in the report I prepared or on this blog back in 2006.

What is new? Well, for a start they aren’t going to make Voter Registration compulsory. Back in 2006 I debated this briefly with Damien Blake… as I recall Damien had proposed automatic registration based on PPS number and date of birth. I questioned whether that would be possible without legislative changes or if it was even desirable. However, the clarification that mandatory registration is now off the table is new.

The proposal for a centralised governance agency and the removal of responsibility for Franchise /Electoral Register information from the Local Authorities sounds new. But it’s not. It’s a variation on a theme that simply addresses the criticism I had of the original Labour Party proposal. By creating a single agency the issues of Accountability/Responsibility and Governance are greatly simplified, as are issues of standardisation of forms and processes and information systems.

One new thing is the notion that people should be able to update their details year round, not just in a narrow window in November. This is a small but significant change in process and protocol that addresses a likely root cause.

What is also new – to an extent – is the clear proposal that this National Electoral Office should be managed by a single head (one leader), answerable to the Dail and outside the normal Civil Service structures (enabling them to hire their own staff to meet their needs). This is important as it sets out a clear governance and accountability structure (which I’d emphasised was needed – Labour’s initial proposal was for a Quango to work in tandem with Local Authorities… a recipe for ‘too many cooks’ if ever I’d heard one). That this head should have the same tenure as a judge to “promote independence from government” is also important, not just because of the independence and allegiance issues it gets around, but also because it sends a very clear message.

The Electoral Register is an important Information Asset and needs to be managed as such. It is not a ‘clerical’ function that can be left to the side when other tasks need to be performed. It is serious work for serious people with serious consequences when it goes wrong.

Putting its management on a totally independent footing with clear accountability to the Oireachtas and the Electorate rather than in an under-resourced and undervalued section within one of 34 Local Authorities assures an adequate consistency of Governance and a Constancy of Purpose. The risk is that unless this agency is properly funded and resourced it will become a ‘quality department’ function that is all talk and no trousers and will fail to achieve its objectives.

As much of the proposals seem to be based on (or eerily parallel) analysis and recommendations I was formulating back in 2006, I humbly put myself forward for the position of Head of the National Elections Office

It is timely that some people visited those posts as our Local Elections are coming up in less than 18 months (June 2009) and frankly, unless there is some immense effort going on behind the scenes that I haven’t heard of, the Register is still in a poor state.

The issue isn’t the Register per se but the processes that surround it, the apparent lack of a culture where the leadership take the quality of this information seriously enough to make the necessary changes to address the cultural, political and process problems that have resulted in it being buggered.

There are a few consolidating posts knocking around on this blog as I’ve pulled things together before. However a quick search for “Electoral Register” will pull all the posts I’ve done on this together. (If you’ve clicked the link all the articles are presented below).

I’ve also got a presentation on the subject over at the IQNetwork website, and I did a report (which did go to John Gormely’s predecessor) which can be found here, and I wrote Scrap and Rework articlethat I submitted to various Irish newspapers at the time to no avail but which has been published internationally (in print and on-line).

At this stage, I sense that as it doesn’t involve mercury filled CFLs or Carbon taxes, the state of the electoral register and the legislative framework that surrounds it (a lot of the process issues require legislative changes to address them) has slipped down the list of priorities our Minister has.

However, with Local Elections looming it is important that this issue be addressed.

Today, Mr Gormley came out in favour of Electronic Voting. Well, actually that isn’t entirely correct.. he has stated that he would like to see electronic voting in Ireland and would not like to abandon the investment made in the e-voting machines we have in mothballs if they can be adapted to secure public confidence.

He appears to have missed the breaking news from the Netherlands where the Courts have ruled that the use of their e-voting machines is illegal because they can be hacked.

Personally I think that the Minister should step back from the white elephant of these e-voting machines and take a look at the information quality requirments of the entire election process.

1. Our Electoral Register is in a shambles. A key root cause is the design of the electoral register forms… they are simply appalling and do not capture information in a clear and error-proofed manner. A holistic Information Management strategy needs to be developed and implemented, along with adequate governance, funding and resources to help ensure high quality of information in the Electoral Register. This will likely require changes to legislation to allow for improvements in the Electoral Register processes and to clarify responsibilities and accountabilities for the management of this critical information.
2. A clear and unbiased view needs to be taken of how best we can ensure a verifiable voting process so that votes dont’ go missing, get tampered with or are just not counted. Pencil and paper means that voters who mark the box with their preference can see their preference going into the ballot box… that is a level of confidence in the process that currently isn’t matched by e-voting.

Rather than continuing to piss around with the e-voting machines, I would much rather the Minister take a strong leadership stance as regards the quality of the Electoral Register and its related processes. His predecessor tried to pass the buck and it would seem Mr Gormley hasn’t yet grasped the reins (sorry for mixing my metaphors like that). The investment in the key set of master data for our electoral processes – the Register of Electors – would be a much better spend of (increasingly constrained) government funds (ie the funds we taxpayers provide).

In business people take investment decisions every day and spend money with the goal of making more back. But every day business managers have to draw a line under poor investments and walk away from the business idea to spend their resources on more valuable opportunities. Seeking to spend more money on a bad idea in the hope that enough money might make it a good idea is just bad business. A number of people I know, myself included, have walked away from business ideas because they weren’t working or could not be made to work with the resources available. Yes it is a pain in the arse, yes there is a sense of failure, but at least you can move forward knowing you have made a tough decision and can learn from it.

Or perhaps Minister Gormely is auditioning for a part in a remake of Monty Python & The Holy Grail? How many castles will we need to build in the e-voting swamp before they stop sinking?

I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ‘em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one… stayed up! And that’s what you’re gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

Investing in key infrastructure and assets (the electoral register and its related processes and governance) which will be used either in the ‘as is’ world (pencil and paper voting) or the ‘to be world’ (the utopia of secure and seamless e-voting) is a better investment of resources.

Chasing the Fianna Fail pipe dream of e-voting simply because it is what the bigger boys at the Cabinet table want you to smacks of an inability to see the wood for the trees and prioritise what will work in the lifetime of the Government (improving the Register and its governance) over what will never work in the lifetime of the Government (e-voting machines).

Rest assured that I haven’t forgotten about it and am working on collating the media reports of issues and tracking down other substantiated cases of problems with the electoral register. I will be producing an updated analysis of the likely root causes which I will publish here and over at the IQ Network website (www.iqnetwork.org). I may even get around to doing a presentation on it to the IQ Network in the coming months.

Suffice it to say the issues are both simple and complex and the likely scope of root causes ranges from a failure of governance from Government, the lack of a clear strategy for improving the quality of the register, a reliance on scrap and rework to ensure accuracy (doomed from the beginning) and also the actions or inactions of key people in the voter registration and verification processes (including the public).

Updates to come soon.

Fast forward to now… the Scottish election is in a state of disarray given the failure of their electronic voting system. Problems were also reported in Northern England.

Perhaps they should have stuck to pencils and paper and avoided this embarassment?

McGarr Solicitors have just posted an update on the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral boundaries. The case, which was to be heard today, has been adjourned on request of the Defendants. The case is now to belisted for mention again next Tuesday (8th May).

Perhaps I am overly cynical and maybe I’m jumping at shadows but I do find it an interesting co-incidence that the Defendants sought the adjourning of this case from the day that Fianna Fail were launching their election manifesto.

Perhaps I am seeing ill motive in otherwise innocent action given that this adjourment coincides with a week in which the Government parties have been on the back foot and have seen headline after headline tumbling out that make important things like winning an election tricky.

Certainly it would have made life tricky for Government TDs to focus on the manifesto soundbites on the evening news if all the journos wanted to talk about was a court case about whether they had dropped the ball on protecting democracy.

Those constituencies that are under represented based on the Census figures should consider their own version of ‘Rock the Vote’ to the tune of the classic Dire Straits track “Money for Nothing”…

Now that I think of it, that song is eminently appropriate given the lack of clarity about the Taoiseach’s financial affairs… which may indeed be perfectly legitmate and above board. He’s just not doing a good job of convincing people that that is the case.

This story mentions specifically the possible need for an additional TD in Dublin West as a result of the 8000 population growth in the area that the Census shows.

RTE have, unfortunately, failed to point out the other constituencies that are under represented and the half-dozen or so that are over represented. They do, however, make the point that the cities in Ireland (of which there are only 5) have lost population share to other areas…

Of course this information was available in the public domain since the 29th of March and forms the basis of the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral constituency boundaries (or rather the failure of the Government to rework those boundaries in light of the census data).