The Agency for the Protection of Personal Data (AZLP) prohibited the State Election Commission (SEC) from processing personal data from the voter list, which is carried out outside Montenegro.
"The SEC is ordered to delete the personal data of 1.973 voters registered in the voter list for the municipality of Herceg Novi for the local elections held on May 9, which were collected outside of Montenegro without a legal basis, contrary to the Law on the Protection of Personal Data," states the decision which signed by the President of the Council Happy Radojic.
The SEC announced at the end of April that "the consistent application of the powers and obligations prescribed by law contributes to the rule of law and the improvement of trust in the electoral process in the best possible way."
A day later, two initiatives were submitted to the AZLP to investigate suspicions that the Commission illegally processed personal data so that the unique identity number of each voter in Novi was checked electronically through the voter lists of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Based on the allegations from the written statement of the SEC official who conducted the search, the processing was done by entering the voter's ID into the form on the website birackispisak.gov.rs and manually entering the text from the image when the number of 1.973 duplicate voters was determined. The document also states that in the BiH voter list application (izbori.ba) data had to be entered in three fields - name, surname and JMB, as well as "reCAPTCHA" (clicking on the thumbnails of hydrants, chimneys, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings... .) which required the use of much more time to process one query, a search was performed for exactly these 1.973 voters.
"The conducted search established that 55 voters simultaneously have the right to vote in Montenegro, Serbia and Republika Srpska", it is stated in the document of the AZLP Council.
AZLP points out that working with this data is indisputable for the SEC in the Montenegrin legal system and only in the Montenegrin legal system in terms of the territorial validity of these laws.
In no provision, it is stated in the explanation of the decision, is the authority given to the SEC to check and compare the identity number of any voter from Montenegro in another state, especially the identity numbers from the entire extracts from the voter list for certain municipalities. , in the specific case it is about 25.445 voters, if there is no bilateral contract or agreement for this.
In the decision of the AZLP, it is stated that the SEC in this particular case carried out one of the quantitatively largest encroachments on the right to the protection of personal data. This, it is stated in the explanation, was done in an "illegal and dishonest manner" and that the action was the result of "pure arbitrariness and selectivity devoid of any valid legal basis", contrary to the Personal Data Protection Act.
The supervision established that the SEC Secretary (Nikola Dedeić) gave a verbal order to an official to check voters, so in relation to this fact it was established that the secretary's verbal order does not refer to the execution of the commission's decisions and conclusions, nor was this issue initiated by him at its sessions.
Only after the completed actions on April 16 did the SEC request an opinion from the AZLP regarding compliance with the processing of personal data in the specific case. On May 18, the SEC submitted an objection to the Minutes on the performed supervision of AZLP.
On June 17, the Parliament of Montenegro resolved Aleks Ivanovic from the position of SEC president.
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