There was a story published in the Ontario, Canada Welland Tribune that just begs for more information to be provided.
Apparently, the City of Welland bought a commercial computer program - unnamed - to help the City Clerk generate 24,072 voter notification cards containing a voter's name, home address, ward, poll number and voting location. Unfortunately, 23,000 of the cards were later found out to contain mistakes.
The City Clerk says that 600 notification cards were initially printed and verified. After that verification process, the remaining 23,472 notification cards were printed and sent out. Soon afterwards, it became apparent that nearly all of those had wrong wards or poll numbers on them, but correct voting location.
The City Clerk was quoted as saying that there was nothing wrong with the voter database or its information.
The City Clerk decided to reprint all 24,072 notification cards, this time on colored paper instead of white paper that was used originally. The white notification cards should be thrown away.
This time, the City Clerk and her staff did a random check of hundreds of notification cards and found them to be correct.
The City Clerk's office could not say how much it was going to cost to do the job twice.
Nor, apparently, did it provide any sort of detailed explanation of what happened and why.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
