Parties’ double speak on voters’ data sharing issue

ISLAMABAD: While today the political parties are raising hue and cry over the alleged leakage of voters’ data to outsiders, The News on April 27, 2018 revealed how parliament itself allowed through the unanimously passed Elections Act 2017 the sharing of the same data despite Nadra's opposition.

Nadra and ECP officials had warned the Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reforms not to expose the database of over 100 million voters for risks of possible misuse of this national data by hackers and criminals but their serious reservations were ignored by the MPs.

The Section 79(3) of the Elections Act 2017 was considered seriously problematic by the experts of Nadra and ECP but the political parties snubbed them to have their access to the voters’ data.

The Section 79 deals with the supply of final electoral rolls and provides for: “(1) The Commission shall provide the Returning Officer for each constituency with copies of final electoral rolls for all the electoral areas within that constituency. (2) The Returning Officer shall provide the Presiding Officer of each polling station with copies of the final electoral rolls containing the names of the voters entitled to vote at that polling station. (3) On the application of a candidate or his election agent, the District Election Commissioner or any officer authorised person on this behalf by the Commission shall provide to a candidate or an election agent a hard and searchable soft copy on universal serial bus (USB) in portable document format (PDF) or any other tamper-proof format of the final electoral roll with photographs of the voters and shall ensure that the copy is the same as provided to the Returning Officer and Presiding Officers.”

In April last, this newspaper had warned how this provision of the Act would make the voters’ data vulnerable.

According to a cybersecurity expert, this availability of 104 million voters’ database, which is actually derived from the citizens' database of Nadra, to a common man is recipe of disaster in terms of privacy of every Pakistani citizen’s identity with photographs and resulting his/her security. The soft copy of the voters’ data can quickly be copied and transmitted in a single click of button, resultantly causing colossal damage to the country's national asset i.e. civil registry and voters’ database.

Although reputed Nadra chairman is being targeted by some political parties for alleged leakage of the data; official documents show that Nadra, which is the custodian of Pakistani nationals’ database, as well as the ECP officials had warned the Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reform (PCER) to desist from making voters’ data available to anyone. However, according to an informed source, the Committee not only rejected the Nadra and ECP’s concerns but snubbed their officials too.

According to the minutes of the 88th meeting of the sub-committee of the Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reforms, “Regarding reservations expressed by Nadra representatives about provision of copies of electoral rolls to the candidates in both hard and soft (searchable USB-PDF format) with photographs of voters, the Sub-Committee decided that these reservations might be submitted in writing to the PCER which had decided the issue in the last meeting.”

Sources said that like Nadra, the ECP had also expressed its concern over exposing the national data to local as well as foreign hackers, anti-state elements and other criminals. However, when the issue was taken up in the main committee - PCER-, these departments’ concerns were rejected and the committee decided to make its proposal part of the Elections Act 2017.

“After listening to the views of Nadra and ECP, the main PCER had unanimously agreed and decided that since they were legislators so they wanted to bring new change in Act that would allow to give softcopy of electoral rolls along with photographs on USB,” an official source who was present in the meeting was quoted as saying by this newspaper’s April 27 report on the subject., adding, “They even snubbed the officials.”