At the risk of incurring the wrath of The Washington Post by linking to them, here’s an article with current interest that exposes a broader issue:
Thousands Face Mix-Ups In Voter Registrations
It occurs to me that this is a classic Customer Data Integration issue – name pattern matching and verification of the “right” information across multiple databases. There are several responses to this issue, most of which involve trying to include every record possible in the final result set.
I find it interesting that the Republican response to this is to automatically disqualify all those records that do not match, which is curious to me because I doubt that they would do that in the course of their own businesses. It leads me to believe that they really don’t want to fix the issue because it serves them politically (third major election in a row, folks). Food for thought on what really matters to some people…