Log In

Reset Password
BERMUDA | RSS PODCAST

OBA keeps up heat on voter details release

One Bermuda Alliance leader Jeanne Atherden (File photograph)

The One Bermuda Alliance repeated its call for the Parliamentary Registrar to release a report into the controversial release of voter information.

Opposition leader Jeanne Atherden said a number of “very troubling questions” remained unanswered on how people’s e-mail addresses and phone numbers were given to the Progressive Labour Party between 2012 and 2017.

Earlier this week, Parliamentary Registrar Tenia Woolridge issued a statement saying the matter had been dealt with appropriately by John Rankin, the Governor, in a letter “communicating the results of the Parliamentary Registrar’s review”.

However Ms Woolridge has not released that review.

Ms Atherden said: “The PR must release to the public her investigative report into this massive breach of voters’ trust.

“If there is nothing to hide, why is the current PR refusing to release her investigative report to the public?”

The Opposition leader said questions unanswered included:

• How many thousands of voters’ private e-mail addresses, home phones, and mobile numbers were improperly provided by the Office of the PR to the PLP?

• Why did former Parliamentary Registrar Randy Scott agree to provide confidential voter data to only the PLP when it was not also provided to the OBA?

• How did the PR, after her appointment in 2014, not know that confidential information continued to be provided to the PLP until some point in 2017, after the General Election? When was the information shut down?

Ms Woolridge previously said: “Once this information sharing was brought to [my] attention [I] took immediate steps to shut it down”.

Ms Atherden said: “If the current PR felt compelled to “shut it down” and stop the provision of confidential voter data to the PLP, why was this breach of trust not made public until voters complained about it?

“The current PR cannot just stick her head in the sand and ignore a decision which, on her statement, was taken by someone else in her Office.

“The provision of confidential voter information to the PLP continued to happen during her watch from her appointment in 2014 until 2017.

“Did she know about this breach of the Public’s trust or not? If not, why not?”

David Burt, now the Premier but then the Opposition leader, said before the election in 2017: “The information we received is the same information that we have received from the Parliamentary Registrar, I want to say … for the last ten years. The information we received does include that [e-mail addresses], yes.

“We have a link that we download the information from that we have been downloading information from for the past seven or eight years.”

Ms Atherden said: “Nowhere in her statement does the PR explain how it could possibly be fair for the Office of the PR to provide confidential voter data to one political party, the PLP, but not give the same information to the OBA.

“The public has a right to know why their private information was given to the PLP by the Office of the Parliamentary Registrar and what is going to be done about this massive breach of trust.”