How about this as a crazy idea?

Use the electronic forms (these do exist0 of the register to generate addresses for envelopes for letters to be sent to every voter on the register. Send every voter a form with a stamped address envelope which has their name and address as on the register and a place for them to enter their PPSN and then to drop it back in the post.

Surely that is a straight forward distribution job. A big one but straightforward enough. The post bill might on the surface look like 2 million euros but I’m sure the government could get a discount for such a big job.

Then simply hire in students or those looking for temporary work. It is then just a massive data entry job to bring all that information together and a data processing job to ensure that the PPS numbers are valid, that the people are alive, that people are on the system once only.

Pay €15 per hour for the entry and say you got 60 per hour that would be 480 per day per person at a cost of €120 per day so we be paying 25c per entry. So 2 million votes would be €500K, those figures are rough and I’m not sure what rates data entry pays or what exact speeds we should expect in order to have decent accuracy.

You hire 100 people temporarily and at 48,000 entries per day they would be done in 40 days. Eight weeks or two months. Double that number employed to ensure that the data entry people are just typing and others are opening the envelopes and separating and sorting the forms. It would be kind of like a massive election count effort. At night the database so far created could be cross checked against the revenue and individuals work can reviewed daily also to ensure that no larger scale systematic mistakes are made.

Folks, this need not be a party political issue other than to suggest that if no real action is taken the those in power are incompetent.

As a matter of curiousity, do you know if Minister of State Ahern is the only Minister of State to serve simultaneously in two separate government Departments? I’m glad I checked because initially I though you’d made an error in attaching him to Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (in addition to DEHLG).

If you want to learn more on the data quality side (which isn’t an IT issue per se).

The analogy I would give is that Information is water. Information Technology is plumbing. Information Quality makes sure that you aren’t filling the kettle from the loo (Information Architecture) and that the water is fit to drink and wash yourself.

My concern with your posts is that I’m afraid I’m oversimplifying the issue when I simply say “throw it out”. I come from something of an IT background, but not so much on the Data Quality side. Your post is blank at the mo, but I’ll check it again in a bit.

Scrapping the election in its entirety is a valid step. However, to do so in the absence of a clear strategy to identify and address root causes will fix the problem of today but will not prevent the problems of tomorrow.

Non-nationals, who are here legally, have voting entitlements at Local Election level (as far as I understand). It’s not simply an issue of having a vote or not having a vote- for example, UK citizens can vote in Dail, European and Local pols, but other EU citizens can only vote in Euro and Local polls. Only Irish Citizens can vote for President and in referendums. This is all catered for in the current register, and as such could easily be catered for in any new system.

D

It is possible to input some code of entitlements surely i.e. 1=full voting rights 2=Local and EU etc as the case requires. All newly issued PPS get the code required and those generated automatically are assigned 1 by default or something.