‘Reengineering’ U.S. death data collection: the technology and labour behind electronic death registration

This article explores the data entry labour demands of electronic death registration systems (EDRS), the jurisdiction-specific software systems developed in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s to 'reengineer' the process that informs vital statistics officials of deaths. Over decades of deliberations about how best to design and implement the tools, officials knew of two key issues that challenged death registration historically: the system moved slowly, and the data it produced was not always accurate. This article explores the techno-solutionism that led to the framing of EDRS as a tool that could solve these two issues simultaneously, improving both ease of data entry and the data's integrity. But this flawed optimism about EDRS's dual affordances, the paper argues, contributed to the tool's sluggish implementation.