Corruption still needs to be proven in a court of law. Incompetence will have to be objectively diagnosed by someone competent. Yet, while all judgement is withheld, there is no escaping the conclusion that we can no longer rely on an identity card issued by the Maltese authorities to provide us with truthful information.

That raises many practical questions because, in an ever more crowded and busier environment, we need ways of knowing that the people we relate with are who they say they are. It raises some fundamental questions about the viability of our democracy as well.

The practical questions have been on many people’s lips since Jason Azzopardi managed what the police did not attempt: to get a magistrate to start collecting evidence of wrongdoing at the government’s identity agency. At first, it was about minor inconvenience: filtering out of one’s mailbox letters addressed to people unknown. But then we started hearing of more sinister experiences. Consider the case of the public hospital patient who found that his medical records reliably told their doctor they had been dead for three weeks.

The information on each and every identity card issued by the local authorities is held on one of the most valuable treasures in the trust of our government: the unimaginatively labelled ‘Common Database’, or even less imaginatively, the ‘CDB’. It’s the repository of the personal data the government holds on citizens. Every government agency or department that needs to know who you are, how old you are, who’s related to you and where you live dips into it. The individual agencies then pin what they need to know about you to your entry in the CDB.

Since there are likely a hundred Joe Micallefs, each Joe Micallef has a unique number attached to them. If they’re born here, they are assigned that number the day their birth is registered with the authorities, and they live with it for the rest of their lives. If they’re not born here, they’re assigned a unique number the day they make themselves known to the local authorities.

All those Joe Micallefs are confusing. The unique number held by each one of them is not. The key is the uniqueness of the number. One number calls up one person. It also calls up their life history, their status and their location. And, pinned with it, their medical record, their criminal record, their tax obligations, their education and their right to vote.

This is important stuff. But it does not stop there. When the government issues each individual with an identity card, it – the government – testifies to the veracity of the information contained therein. The identity card is a certificate of the truthfulness of its contents.

Consider everyone’s first experience of holding an identity card. You get it as a 14-year-old to assure your examiner at your maths exam that you are entitled to the grade that will be issued in your name and you did not hire someone smarter to sit for the exam on your behalf. No more checks are done.

You show your identity card and a maths grade is issued to you according to your performance at the exam. A couple of years later,. you join your friends in a bar where you need to be 16 to be allowed in. The outlet has the legal obligation to verify your age. They don’t call up your mother. They check your identity card and presume the date of birth it reports is accurate.

Your bank, your internet provider, your notary, your doctor, your pharmacist, anyone buying anything from you, or selling it to you: they need to know you are who you say you are. You produce your identity card and, as the government is your witness, that’s the end of that.

The data in the CDB can never have been infallibly accurate. The system relies on people registering their permanent presence or absence here. It relies on them declaring any changes to their addresses. It relies on people being truthful and not, for example, declaring their holiday home as their permanent address to spread out their electricity benefits or save on the Gozo ferry tickets.

Without an accurate headcount of our population, we may never have free and fair elections again- Manuel Delia

These are background challenges that were always there. They were never big enough to doubt the general reliability of the identity system. After all, in any system operated by the government, you need both some enforcement and a presumption that most people are going to be honest. There should be no question of the government’s honesty, however doubtful its ability to enforce.

The identity system has now become the unusable mess it is because, for the last decade, the government’s honesty could no longer be relied on. I’m not speaking about rogue, corrupt officers. I’m talking about institutional dishonesty.

Remember how the law required billionaires buying Maltese passports to live here for a year before being able to apply for one? Almost all of them lied about living here, declaring imaginary addresses: basements, garages, fourth-floor apartments in edifices that were never built. The government knew this and actively encouraged applicants to lie. And the government hid the lie. The government justified the fraud at its expense with the money these new Maltese citizens paid to purchase their passports.

Is it at all surprising then that officials at the identity agency figured that, if their bosses did not care about registering false addresses for billionaires buying passports, they would not care about registering false addresses for imported labourers willing to pay them a bribe?

Banks and notaries and entertainment providers, and all sorts of commercial operators, are scratching their heads wondering if they will need to set up their own identity verification infrastructure now and expand a new business cost to work around useless government-issued identity cards. Once again, they find themselves wondering about the utility of government. Is it really any more than a quasi-comical irrelevance but for the enormous expense of keeping it there?

Next, people will have to wonder if they can trust their hospital or their school to handle their medical and educational records with a measure of integrity. This will widen the gap between the people who can afford private care and schooling and people who have to contend with the inept chaos of a government that can’t figure out who they are.

In the noise and the confusion, perhaps few people will have time to feel the chill of the realisation that, without an accurate headcount of our population, we may never have free and fair elections again. If you’re asked where you live, present your national identity card. It will say you’re a resident of Downtown Kakistocracy.