‘Privacy concerns’ raised for unsecured voters’ lists

Elections Canada survey highlights need for reform

• The Privacy Commissioner is concerned about privacy violations after an Elections Canada survey revealed only 14 per cent of candidates who used a voters list in last fall’s federal election say they properly secured the sensitive document.

“The Elections Canada survey results do raise some privacy concerns and highlight the need for law reform to create legal obligations that would help to ensure that person information held by political parties is better protected,” Vito Pilieci, a spokesperson for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC), told the National Post.

According to an Ekos Research poll commissioned by Elections Canada surveying over 1,000 candidates in last fall’s election, the vast majority of them (80 per cent) used a voters list provided by Elections Canada during the campaign.

This document contains the name, address and a unique Elections Canada identifier of each registered voter in their riding. Parties and candidates are only allowed to use that information for electoral purposes, such as communication with voters, soliciting contributions and recruiting new party members.

But those who used the list didn’t seem to be very concerned with properly safeguarding sensitive voters’ information, according to the Elections Canada poll.

Only 14 per cent said they tried to limit access “in general” to the document, and barely one-quarter admitted to destroying the document after the election.

Only four per cent of candidates said they encrypted the lists, and 36 per cent made an effort to store the lists in a secure or locked place.

Yet, all of those procedures, and many more, are part of Elections Canada’s guidelines to safeguarding the sensitive documents, which are explained to all candidates who receive them.

“Respecting electors’ privacy is an important element of protecting electors’ trust in the democratic institutions of the country,” the federal agency warns in its most recent edition of “Guidelines for Use of the Lists of Electors.”

Securing the content of the voters lists is also something the Privacy Commissioner has hammered on repeatedly lately.

“We have recommended that parties take steps to protect personal information from unauthorized access and make their employees, volunteers and contractors aware of the importance of maintaining the confidentiality of personal information,” Pilieci said.

“As well, we noted that personal information should only be kept as long as necessary to satisfy the purposes for which it was collected, and then destroy the information securely,” he added.

But there remains very little that federal agencies and watchdogs can do to actually enforce these guidelines. As of now, political parties are not subjected to Canada’s two main federal privacy laws: the Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. At the provincial level, only British Columbia has put in place privacy laws that cover political parties.

The only time parties or candidates can be penalized is if they use the lists for unauthorized reasons, at which point it becomes a criminal offence under the Elections Act that can lead to fines of up to $ 10,000 and/or up to one year of imprisonment.

That’s something the Privacy Commissioner has begged the federal government to change in the last few years.

“Commissioner Daniel Therrien has repeatedly called for political parties, which collect vast amounts of data about voters, to be subject to legislation that creates obligations based on internationally recognized privacy principles and for an independent third party with authority to verify compliance,” Pilieci said in an email.

In the meantime, Elections Canada says it is taking a good look at the survey responses from 2019 candidates to see what can be improved before the next campaign.

But already back in 2018, the Privacy Commissioner was telling parliamentarians that it was urgent to better protect Canadians’ personal information.

A review by his office of parties’ privacy policies showed that they “fall way short of globally accepted fair information principles.”

He believes that the government should do more to ensure Canadians’ private data is protected, such as subjecting political parties to federal privacy laws and subjecting them to oversight by an independent third party.

“The integrity of our democratic processes is clearly facing significant risks. In my view, the time to act is now,” Therrien told members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in June 2018, a statement his office says still holds today.

RESPECTING ELECTORS’ PRIVACY IS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF PROTECTING ELECTORS’ TRUST.