Member Article

Businessman makes electoral roll offer

A Yorkshire businessman has offered every local authority in the country to send him their electoral rolls for a free check for duplications.

The offer follows a major error by City of Lincoln Council which saw 23 voters issued with duplicate polling cards.

Tony Kemp, whose print firm DMP works with complex databases all the time, said: “This is scandalous. It is appalling that a local authority, the custodian of our precious electoral roll, cannot undertake the most basic data hygiene and maintain a simple database of voters.”

At his Keighley, West Yorkshire-based business, Tony produces marketing and financial mailings for a variety of clients with the utmost importance placed on cleansing data before any mailing takes place.

Said Tony: “I am shocked at this error in Lincolnshire and would challenge every local authority to send us their electoral roll data and we will run free deduplication and deceased checks as it is in all of our interests to protect our democracy”.

Tony explained that electoral rolls identify people by National Insurance numbers so regardless of how many times they are entered online, there should still only be one unique identifier per person, making deduplication a routine activity. Couple this with full names, addresses and dates of birth and it should be simple to spot double entries.

The City of Lincoln Council had sent duplicate polling cards to 23 people and according to the BBC has now amended its electoral roll after the error came to light.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by DMP .