The DOBlog

Tag: Electoral IQ

  • What the…? – Irish Political coverage ignores the Elephant in the room

    I’m frankly baffled. We are in the run up to a General Election here in Ireland. All the media pundits are quoting 24th May as the date of the (as yet unannounced) election. This would require our parliament to be dissolved at the latest next week.

    Ireland runs a Proportional Representation/Single Transferable Vote system. It is built into our Consitution. There is a large body of legal opinion around the thresholds at which the ratio of elected representatives to number of people in a constituency breaches the Constitution. We are, it seems, at that point in 10 consituencies out of a total of 43. This has resulted in a Constitutional challenge in the High Court by two Independent TDs (Members of Parliament) to the holding of any election until the balance of Proportional Representation is restored through changes to the make up of Consituencies.

    The fact that key demographics had changed and there was a risk that the Electoral Constituency boundaries or numbers of representatives in each consituency might need to be altered was identified in September 2006 when the preliminary figures from our Census were published. There is no legal obligation on the Government to act or react to these however. The final Census figures were published on the 29th of March. These should be acted on or else there is the risk of any election being declared unconstitutional.

    The risk is that if the Dáil (our parliament) is dissolved prior to an election the running of which is declared unconstitutional until the parliament (the one that has been dissolved) addresses the issue of the Electoral contituencies then we could find ourselves with a bit of a governmental and Constitutional crisis.

    Yet the media continue to focus on the dog and pony show but ignore the Gorrilla in the room. The Executive arm of Government continues to barrel down the path to an election without any apparent appreciation of the risk that exists, both to the simple fact of an election and to the essence of our Constitution. Why has the existence of this Constitutional challenge not been publicised more? Why are the media giving the politicians sound-bite time to puff their agendas ahead of an election being called but they don’t ask the relevant politicians why we find ourselves at a juncture where the Constitutionality of our Electoral system is being challenged due a disproportionality in representation?

    The chronic lack of leadership and accountability on the part of the Government Minister charged with monitoring and managing how our Electoral Register and our Electoral Processes operate is shocking. However at least it is consistent with his lack of leadership and lack of willingness to be accountable for anything other than a soundbite on the news (he was going to ‘bash some heads together’ over the Galway water crisis apparently).

    To tie this back to my theme of Information Quality Management, Deming called on management to adopt a “constancy of purpose” and to wholeheartedly take on “the new philosophy” while breaking down barriers between people/organisations and driving out the fear that prevents the delivery of quality.

    Why does the relevant Minister seem to act in a manner that could only serve to drive in fear and increase the barriers that might exist that would prevent a good job being done? What is our incumbent Government’s purpose that they are constant to? What is the philosophy that they are pursuing?

    I’m off to Paddy Powers to place a bet that the Election won’t be called this side of June. Congratulations to Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath for taking a stand on this issue.

  • First Post Anniversary… Electoral Register Processes Still Broken

    The DobBlog is 1 year old today.

    What have we achieved? Well, about 50,000 words on the state of the Irish Electoral Register, syndicated publication of an article based on those words in two International newsletters for IT/Business Intelligence professionals and a wordpress template I’m finally not unhappy with.

    The electoral register is still buggered (that’s a technical term). The scrap and rework (as predicted) was inconsistent and hasn’t fixed the underlying problems. As soon as the clean up stopped, the register has begun to drift to inaccuracy again.

    The Government continues to be cavalier about the issues involved in our electoral system… a number of constituencies will be under represented in the next Dail because of the failure of the Government to react to the population changes in the Census. That’s assuming the election can go ahead given the Constitutional challenge that has commenced.

    The understanding of the importance of good quality information and well designed processes to gather and use that information has grown however amongst a small (and growing) group of occasional visitors to the blog.

    Hopefully the next 12 months will bring enlightenment to Government on some of the issues I’ve blogged about this year and perhaps they will seek out good practices. Hopefully as well we will see some critical commentary in the media on these types of issue. I lost count of the number of pieces I submitted to Irish media during the year. My hit rate outside of Ireland this year is 2 for 2… domestically it is 0 for lots more.

  • Electoral Constituencies

    There is a bit of a bru-hahah brewing over yonder at McGarr Solicitors. It appears that their offices are acting for Finian McGrath and Catherine Murphy in their challenge to the Constitutionality of the forthcoming (but still to be announced) General Election.

    What baffles me is that in September of last year there was strong indication in the preliminary census figures that this issue might arise. That’s nearly 8 months ago. As someone who managed projects for a living I’d LOVE to have a 8 month heads up that there might be a problem with a key project I was responsible for (I’m sure m’learned colleagues over at McGarr’s will advise us with whom the buck stops for running elections in this State).

    While I accept that there may have been legal impediments to actually implementing changes on foot of the preliminary census figures I would be interested to know what prevented some form of ‘exploratory’ review to develop a contingency plan should the final figures bear out the preliminary results (which on the whole they seem to have). This would have put the Minister in the position of being able, a la Blue Peter, to present ‘one he prepared earlier’ in terms of a plan and a series of recommendations which would require updating and a lesser degree of tweaking to reflect the final census figures. I invite the team in McGarr Solicitors to comment here to advise on what the likely legal obstacles might have been to a contingency planning committee being established to look at the risk raised by the preliminary census figures and devise a set of recommendations.

    The current proposal to amend boundaries etc. after the election approximates to locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, particularly in light of the current legal challenge.

  • DoBlog is 1 year old this month

    Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register.

    With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is worth revisiting where we are on that particular issue.

    • The Electoral Register issues are still not resolved
    • There does not appear to have been any substantive analysis of the actual root causes (apart from some work I did off my own bat as a concerned citizen)
    • The work that was done to ‘correct’ the Register was managed inconsistently between Local Authority areas, which means that we may not have improve the accuracy all that much.
    • That work was completed a while ago… the Register will have degraded in quality again since
    • It seems that entire housing estates (even in the Minister’s own constituency) may have been dropped off the Register

    Over on McGarr Solicitors site I paraphrased Paul Simon to describe the state of the Register -“Still broken after all these years”. It is. The scrap and rework was botched and it wasn’t even the right thing to do.

    With most elections or polls in Ireland now being decided by the narrowest of margins it is more important than ever that everyone of us who can vote in the forthcoming General Election does vote. It was once said that in a democracy you don’t always get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

    So vote. Vote diligently.

  • Scrap & Rework Article

    Many moons ago I posted a piece on this blog about Information Quality Scrap and Rework in the Irish Electoral Register. This article was submitted to a number of Irish newspapers at the time (when it was very topical) and was referenced at length by tuppenceworth and others.

    Earlier this year I was invited to write for Larry English’s column in DM Review magazine, an international trade magazine for Information Management and Business Intelligence. It appeared in the on-line ‘extended edition’ of the magazine. Here is the link to this month’s DM Review… I’m on page 5 (I’m credited as a contributor but the content appeared here first, and was picked up by B-Eye-Network last year also. For real afficianados of Irish Electoral Register issues, here’s a link to the paper I wrote on the issue back in the dim and distant past.

    Thanks to Larry and his staff for helping with a minor re-write to make the article more ‘American-friendly’. (Larry’s profile that I’ve linked to above is from the IAIDQ website – www.iaidq.org)

  • Electoral Reg (A slight return)

    OK. In an attempt to make this interesting to the kids, I’m ripping off Jimi Hendrix lyrics.

    The Sunday Business Post reported over the weekend that up to 170,000 people may have been taken of the Electoral Register in error. Apparently politicians of all hues are trading war stories of bungled clean ups on the electoral register. Apparently, amongst other things, entire housing estates have been taken off the register and dead people have resurrected and re-registered to vote. The Minister in question, Dick Roche, has even had to acknowledge that he knows of an incident of a disappearing housing estate in Wicklow (wouldn’t it be ironic if it was up on Turlough Hill muses the author, mixing his Irish geography).

    The Fianna Faíl TD for Meath, Johnny Brady, has commented that:

    • huge numbers of elderly voters have been removed from the Register in his area
    • no letters were left to inform people they were being taken off the Register (or at least people don’t recall getting such a letter).

    According to Mr Brady “Some of the field officers who called to houses decided that if they were not at home, they were taken off”. This suggests a degree of inconsitency in the approaches between local authorities… in my earlier post on when the people came knocking I pointed out that they hadn’t spoken to me, but as of today I’m still on the Register. Therefore it would seem that different rules are being applied in Meath and Wexford.

    Divergences in work practices in maintaining the Register is one of the contributing root causes to the whole original mess. Anecdotes of Local Authorities using the Obituraries in the local and national papers to identify dead people were mentioned in dispatches not so long ago.

    And the treatment of the dead is clearly one of the key root causes for the original shambles… with 30% of Waterford’s voters being members of the daisy pushing brigade. Of course, this discrepancy is matched by the inconsistency between the numbers on the register now and the population as measured by the Census.

    Good grief. What a mess.

    Way back in the summer I wrote that the proposal to rebuild the register by going door to door would not address the actual deficiencies in the register. The key approach should have been to tackle the root causes – such as wildly varying work practices in different local authority areas and then to push out cleansing of the register. This should have been done in a clear and transparent manner.

    However, at this point it is important to bear in mind that often the answer you get to a problem isn’t necessarily the answer you want. The Opposition parties seem to have had an expectation that there would be no collateral damage in the clean up of the register. A cliche involving eggs, omlettes and breakage springs to mind. Rather than engage in debate based on anecdote the Opposition parties should try to ‘speak with data’ and to identify clear examples of where people have been taken off the register in error and get evidence of what process or inaction on the part of the Minister or Local Authorities lead to the error.

    For example, Gay (Gabriel) Mitchell (Fine Gael TD) reported his personal experience where he wrote to the Local Authority officers responsible for the Register to tell them that there were two people resident at his address with the same name (his son is also called Gabriel). However only one Gabriel Mitchell was left on the Register. Why? Did Deputy Mitchell forget to include the respective dates of birth? Did his letter fall through the cracks?

    Dick Roche attempted to clean the register by running en masse a broken process. Throwing people at it to perform door to door checks did not address key root causes (like the fact that you can’t change your name on the Electoral Registration form – it only allows for changes of address). When you throw into the mix that the door to door checkers:

    1. Don’t hang around long enough to talk to people (in my personal experience)
    2. Call during the day when people are at work (might that explain why entire estates in the commuter belt of Dublin have disappeared off the Register?)
    3. Seem to have an inconsistent practice as to how to deal with people who don’t answer the door

    then this whole process is a phenomonal white elephant that may have served to make a bad situation slightly worse.

    However – with regard to people who have been taken off the Register in error… there is a question of personal responsibilty here. If they wish to be registered to vote then they should check the register at their local libraries or Garda stations or online (if they are in the 50.7% of people who have internet access) and get themselves registered.

    If you are not in you can’t win. If you’re not on the register you can’t complain about the government you get. And by my reckoning that’s what we have at the moment.

  • Electoral Register Forms

    I previously looked at the issue of the Electoral Register forms – the first point in the information chain that feeds the electoral register. On a whim this morning, I printed a copy out – my intention being to take a closer look at the structure of the form and its layout to see if anything there might contribute to problems in the Electoral register. Attached is a graphic showing what I found….  

    electoral_register1.jpg

    This form cannot be printed completely on a standard printer. The black areas show the sections of the form (instructions and data) that are missing when the form is printed on a standard office laserjet. The clear text area is what is actually printed, which is incomplete data.

    I would have thought this should have been a basic acceptance test  for a downloadable form. As the downloaded form loses important data, it may in itself be contributing to the problem.

    As it stands, my review of the structure of the Electoral Register form will now have to work off the PDF file.

    May 18, 2006

  • Electoral Information Quality – A Consolidating post

    As the blog is getting legs a bit now, I thought it best to consolidate the posts of the last few weeks on the Electoral Register issues into one point of reference, particularly for readers new to the site.

    I am also taken the opportunity to upload a few additional articles etc. that I have written on the issue to the blog for reference.

    Articles:

    First up is a draft paper I have put together on the proposed solutions and why they are likely to be inadequate. 

    Next up is a link to an article I have had published in an International newsletter for Information Quality Management Professionals.

    Finally there is an article based on my post on what scrap and rework is of earlier this month. This article was submitted to national newspapers as an opinion piece – and I should acknowledge the assistance of Simon over on Tuppenceworth with whipping it into shape. Click here to download Scrap and Rework article. The article is also reproduced as an appendix in the previously mentioned report.

    As regards posts – pretty much any of the posts in the Information Quality/Electoral Data Quality category are relevant. I will double check all the post categorisations to make sure that nothing is missing.

    That’s my update for today.

     

     

  • The Irish Times Editorial yesterday…

    The Irish Times ran a nice editorial piece yesterday (2006/05/11) on the Electoral Register that highlighted the administrative failure that surrounds the Electoral Register.

    One good line: “IF the potential for abouse exists within the voting system – and it unequivocally does – the Government’s responsibility is to protect democracy and correct the electoral register”

    The Old Lady of D’Olier Street correctly identifies that there is a “reluctance at official and political level to step outside traditional mechanisms to address the situation”.

    The reported ruling out by Dick Roche of the use of personal identification at polling stations reflects this apparent lack of willing to change processes to improve the quality of the register and improve the controls on the Electoral process. As the Irish Times rightly points out, you have to produce evidence of address to get a parking permit from Local Authorities. I can’t join a library in Dublin because I don’t have a utility bill at an address in Dublin.

    The chronic lack of leadership on this issue is appalling. Here’s a link to a piece I’ve written in an International Journal for Information Quality people… it references some reseach that was done in 2004 into attitudes to Information Quality in UK Public Sector organisations…

    … in the mean time as the Irish Times haven’t responded to the opinion piece I sent them based on my chocolate cake/scrap & rework post I suppose I’ll have to tout it around the other papers… I’ll stick up the draft for reference here later today.

  • Reponse to Damien Blakes’ post on irishelection.com

    Damien Blake written a good piece on IrishElection.com regarding his view on how to address the Electoral Register.

    Much of what he says has merit as a short term solution. He suggests that we scrap the register (no problem there) and rework it from scratch (again, no problem there) rather than limp on with a defective register.

    Damien suggests that my writings will eventually find their way into undergraduate or post graduate theses.  I too look forward to the day that clear thinking about the fundamental best practices of Quality Management applied to Information form part of University curricula at undergraduate level and post-graduate level, much like the practices of Manufacturing Quality Management gained acceptance. In the US this is already beginning to happen, and I have been involved in curriculum development work with an Irish University in a similar vein.

    What I have written is based on a number of years (best part of a decade) working in complex Information Management environments and on the shared experiences of other practitioners in the Information Quality Management space with whom I have spoken at conferences (internationally), and with whom I work on a regular basis as a Director of the International Association for Information & Data Quality. The techniques, methodologies and approaches I put forward are based on my real world,practical experiences in applying best practices that have been proven in other industries and disciplines.

    Damien’s further goes on to suggest using the PPS Number and associated data to register people – preferably automatically. What Damien has suggested here is a process change to address root causes of poor data quality. Excellent. That is what I have been writing on… well at least as far at the review/change of processes goes. I’ll come ot my concerns with his proposal in a moment. Well done for thinking about the root causes of the problem and how the processes can be changed to address it. Top of the class that man.

    Damien’s suggestion doesn’t address the fact that there is no legal obligation on anyone to register to vote, and it could even be argued that one has a constitutional right not to register to vote. Automatic voter registration based on a “Single View of Voter” may not be a runner. Also, the Data Protection Commissioner has limited the uses that a PPS number can be put to – however I am sure legislation could get around that. The Digital Rights Ireland site has a nice paper on it about the ‘scope creep’ in the use of PPS Numbers that I’ve referenced in an earlier post.

    Ultimately, even if we scrapped the Register in the morning and rebuilt it in a shining pristine form, the simple fact is that name and address data degrades at a significant rate. In the absence of clear controls and processes to manage and maintain that data at an acceptable level of quality we will find ourselves rapidly returning to a situation where the Register is unreliable – Scrap and Rework is not the route to a high quality Information asset. It is a step on the journey, and an important process – but in the absence of process re-engineering to address root causes of defects and deficiencies the inevitable result is more scrap and rework.

    Damien’s proposal to use the name/address/citzenship data associated with the PPS number would serve to reduce redundancy of data (multiple copies of the same data held in multiple data stores) but it may run into Data Protection issues. But as a change of process for the management of Electoral Register data to address deficiencies in the existing process it has merit. But should you have to be a tax payer or a recipeint of State benefits in order to vote?

    Damien’s suggestion for a Statutory agency or a reallocation of resources/roles to task someone with maintaining the Register. Again, I am in wholehearted agreement. What Damien proposes here is a review of the Governance model for this data to give clear accountability, authority and mandate and (I would surmise) a standardisation of processes, controls and toolsets for managing and measuring the quality of Electoral Register data. I fully agree with the general thrust of Damien’s proposal here, although the specifics of what that Governance model in my view should be aligned with the requirements of the process and the requirements of the controls necessary to ensure the quality of the electoral register – simply assigning a role with a stroke of a pen does not deliver quality improvements.

    I agree with Damien that the process for voter registration and for maintaining that data should be a simple as possible. Clear definition of processes and business rules to support ‘flow-through’ registration and data maintenance are part of the Information Architecture design that should underpin any long term solution. Simplicity of process  could be part of the ‘customer expectation’ against which the quality of the process (and the information it produces) could be measured. However a simple ‘customer’ interface that sits on top of chaotic processes riddled with deficiencies and absences of controls to ensure the quality of the Information will not achieve the full objective of a simple to operate set of processes or functions that deliver reliable and high-quality Electoral Register information.

    Damien is right. We need to start again. We need to start again in terms of the information in the Register. We need to start again in terms of the Governance model that is put in place to manage this Information Asset. We need to start again in terms of the processes that people follow to create, update and maintain that information to ensure that we achieve our objective of a reliable, accurate (within a margin for error) Electoral Register. We need to start again in terms of how we think about the ‘architecture’ that this Electoral Information is held. We need to start again in terms of ensuring that we adopt appropriate technologies and strategies to address identified weaknesses in the processes for managing our Electoral Register data.

    However, to focus just on scrap and rework simply solves the problem of today. Addressing the root causes in the processes and governance as well as conducting scrap and rework on the data solves today’s problems and prevents those of tomorrow.

    I’m glad Damien and I are in such agreement on the principles, even though we may differ in our view on specifics (specific solutions aren’t my goal here – raising awareness of Best Practices was my intention). I hope he can find the time to attend the Information Quality Master Class that is being held in the RDS on Friday where a person with even more years experience in this domain than I will be sharing his knowledge with delegates