According to the portal, last Tuesday one of the commission’s employees mistakenly sent a letter to the members of the district commissions with almost 20 thousand. according to voter data. It was intended for the pre-election training that started on Wednesday.
It is reported that members were urged to delete the received data as soon as possible after the error was noticed.
CEC Chairperson Lina Petronienė assured the “lrytas.lt” portal that the data was sent to the commission members by mistake, so they were later asked to delete the received letter and not to use the data.
“But the members of the commissions have signed pledges not to disclose voter data. They were not sent to someone outside, but to commission members who work with an even larger amount of voter data,” explained the head of the commission.
According to the chairman of the CEC, practical tasks were formulated for the members of the commission during the training, so accurate voter data was needed. However, voters were not informed about the intention to use the data.
CEC provided a detailed explanation of the situation, stating that no data was leaked.
“Currently, an intensive training process for election commission members is underway. Members of election commissions learn and perform practical tasks on how to work with the CEC information system on election day, so that when the voting process begins, it runs smoothly and without disturbances, and election data is entered in an orderly manner and in the manner determined by the Election Code and procedures approved by decisions of the CEC.
During the training, on the CEC training platform dedicated to training, the members of the commissions have to perform the tasks created by the CEC specifically for these elections.
Such training is held before each election so that members of the commissions have the skills to organize voting until election day, mark voters who have come to vote, fill in voting protocols, register observers, fill in data on ballots issued to voters, enter information on returned unused and damaged ballots, to compile valid and invalid voter votes, to ensure that the information of voters who voted at home is properly compiled, etc.
As for this specific case, 60 municipal election commissions and their informaticists received from the CEC the formed tasks and the list of voters for the training process, which contained the voters’ names, surnames, personal identification codes, their assigned polling stations and voter card numbers. Such information as is necessary to perform the formed training task.
Electoral commissions can only use voter data for election purposes, and specialized training is part of elections. The members of the election commissions have no right to use this data for any other purposes.
The second letter was sent when it was noted that the data in the first letter was not suitable for the training tasks. In other words, the data fragment sent to the municipal election commissions did not correspond to the data fragment uploaded to the training environment.
Noticing this, the colleagues realized that the commissions would not be able to complete the tasks and immediately sent another list and asked to delete the first one.
In response to the question of whether members of the election commissions of one municipality can see the data of voters in other municipalities – of course, they can, since these data are needed for early voting.
For example, when a voter from another municipality votes in Vilnius, or a voter from the city of Panevėžys who is in a hospital in Vilnius, or a voter from Biržai who is serving a sentence in the Kaunas detention center.
Because during elections, when organizing voting in advance, at home, at special points and on the day of the election, the members of the election commissions inevitably see and administer the voters’ personal data.
In the elections of the President of the Republic and the referendum, voters will have the right to vote in any polling station in Lithuania, so all election commission members will have the opportunity to administer the data of voters outside their polling station.
We would like to emphasize that before starting to work in the elections, every member of the election commission is familiarized with the procedure for storing personal data in a signed manner and after giving a promise to protect them”, the CEC provided an explanation.
Tags: training CEC accidentally leaked data thousands voters
