But it’s a genuine mistake and one which was immediately owned up to and apologised for.
That’s just the first step.
It may be a genuine error, but the consequences don’t go away and to some extent, the damage has been done.
Voting has already opened and some voters will have returned their ballots without seeing the profiles.
As Whanganui Māori ward candidate Julie Herewini said, the omission felt “like a bit of a kick in the guts”.
The next step has to be to remedy the situation as best as possible.
In Whanganui, all 4810 Māori ward electors are being sent an individual letter with the candidate profiles included.
Electionz, which operates election services for Whanganui, said it was appropriate that the letter and candidate information only be sent to those “materially affected”, who were people on the Māori roll.
Whanganui District Council ruled out spending $70,000 of ratepayer money to send missing Māori Ward candidate profiles to voters on the general roll as well.
But once elected, Māori ward councillors still represent the entire community.
Everyone is materially affected.
It is the first time Whanganui is voting in a Māori ward and on top of that, voters are having their say on the future of the ward through a referendum.
Whanganui has assembled a talented pool of candidates for its Māori ward and voters on both rolls, whichever way they are voting in the referendum, deserve to see who is running to represent them.
Once the election is over, the final step has to be learning from this blunder.
A full and independent review needs to be done to work out exactly what happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again, and that this election was fair.
Because it wasn’t just Whanganui affected.
This also happened in Ōpōtiki District, South Wairarapa District and Manawatū District across more than one election services provider.
Cost cannot be used as an argument because the cost of not doing everything possible to remedy this catastrophic error is democracy.
