How previous Conservative voter databases went badly wrong

Over on the UCOVI blog is a fascinating pair of posts giving an insider perspective on the many problems that the Conservative Party encountered with its MERLIN and then Votesource databases for recording information about voters.

Some of the problems were public at the time, but these two pieces add lots of eye-catching details, such as:

The use of data in political campaigning is often far too cackhanded to be as sinister as Cambridge Analytica and Brexit/Trump.

I consider my short stint on the IT helpdesk at Tory HQ as the foundation year of my data career. It was here that I picked up a wealth of insights into what could go wrong in data management, database design, and software rollouts.

Creative guesswork was applied by activists canvassing over the phone, with some thinking the “TPS” tag next to opt-out phone numbers meant not “Telephone Preference Service” but instead “Tory Party Supporter”.

Votesource’s software rollout nadir came in early March 2015, when a half-tested new release led to constituency organisers and IT helpdeskers alike logging in to witness Votesource’s calendar showing in Mandarin. I remember my office neighbour suppressing a snigger as I responded to a call with “Yes we are aware that Votesource is in Chinese this morning, and are taking steps to resolve it as quickly as possible”, and from then on until election day, the severity of all and any software or data screw ups to come would be benchmarked against the Chinese calendar.

Conservative activist database end-users make up for their computer illiteracy with creativity and resourcefulness. One elderly volunteer was struggling to login to their MERLIN PC, so the helpdesk team asked them for a screenshot of the login window. Not knowing how to take a screenshot, they sent in the hand-drawn screen.

Both posts are well worth reading in full if you are interested in the use of data in politics: part 1, part 2. If you’ve ever had the horror of discovering a potential data error with a massive mailing, you’ll shudder in sympathy when you read about the nickname problem.

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