During the election rehearsal, the Central Election Commission (CEC) possibly leaked the data of thousands of voters, the "lrytas.lt" portal reports.
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: members of commissions have the right to work with the transferred information
In response to the information that appeared about the allegedly leaked voter data, the CEC states that no voter data was leaked. It is said that the material for the learning process was handed over to the Election Commission.
"Currently, an intensive process of training members of election commissions is underway. The members of the election commissions learn and perform practical tasks on how to work with the CEC information system on the election day, so that when the voting process starts, it runs smoothly and without disturbances, and the election data is entered in an orderly manner and as determined by the Election Code and the procedures approved by the decisions of the CEC", - indicated in the CEC's comment.
According to the CEC, such trainings, during which the election commission uses voter data only for election purposes, are conducted before each election.
The CEC points out that when the information was sent this time, it was noticed that it was not suitable for the tasks intended for training, so it was requested to be removed.
"It was observed that the data of 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," explains the CEC.
Miglė Valonytė (ELTA)
