A leaked Labour Party database showing voting preferences of tens of thousands of voters has shone a spotlight on Malta’s murky election practices.
One data protection lawyer, who spoke to Times of Malta on condition of anonymity, said data protection rules explicitly outlawed holding data on a person’s political views.
Data on 337,384 people, including their names, addresses, ID details and phone numbers, were exposed after a security flaw at an IT company owned by the former Labour president, who is Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi’s brother-in-law, dumped the information online.
In response to the leak, Labour has argued all its data was lawfully held, because the Electoral Commission is legally bound to pass on updated information to political parties about the electoral registry.
While the Commission does pass on electoral registry data to the parties, the information contained in the leak went far beyond this data.
The lawyer said the fact that the Labour Party passed on any election data to a third party was unacceptable.
They have my number and I never gave any consent to this
Questions also remained about how the party had collected people’s mobile numbers and how it had gone about assigning voting preferences to large swathes of the population.
Two PN sources told Times of Malta that the leaked database was definitely compiled from multiple sources.
“The database does contain standard information passed on by the Electoral Commission, like polling booth and document numbers. However, this data was processed and merged with party data to include phone numbers and political affiliations”.
They added that Labour’s database must have definitely come from another data source.
“They have my number and I never gave any consent to this [IT] company or Labour to store my number, let alone divulge it to third parties,” the sources said.
“You don’t build such an accurate dataset by asking a few people around to give you their friends’ numbers.”
The sources said that while the PN does have identical electoral registry data, the phone number data are nowhere near what Labour has.
Another PN source was more concerned that the data had apparently been shared by Labour with individual candidates and a third party.
“The Electoral Commission voter registry data is given to the parties, not individual candidates. This data is very confidential; distributing it could increase the risk of voter tampering”.
On the mobile phone data, the source said this was “nothing extraordinary”, pointing out that in the past, GO even used to allow people to buy the phone directory data on disk.
“Labour is more organised than PN. The PN used to get a lot of data from its committees, but these have pretty much collapsed,” the source said.
Two civil society organisations, Repubblika and the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, have started preparing the groundwork for a class action suit and urged interested parties to apply.
In a statement on Saturday, PN MP Claudette Buttigieg said that Zrinzo Azzopardi's position as a parliamentary secretary was no longer tenable in light of events.