Nice to know we live in such a caring, altruistic society. Last Saturday was (in case some of you hadn’t noticed) voting day, and I happened to have a chat with a certain gentleman who claimed to have received no fewer than six phone calls that morning from a philanthropic organisation known as the “Dar Centrali Nazzjonalista” in Herbert Ganado Street, Pietà.
Very helpful people, I must say. So concerned were they that the gentleman in question might have forgotten there was an election on, that they very generously took it upon themselves to remind him as much… every 45 minutes, all day long, until he finally got the message and went out to vote.
Not only that, but they even took the trouble to offer him and his wife a free lift to the polling station and back in the luxury state-of-the-art, chauffeur-driven PN “Kowc tal-Gabra”: an ambulance-cum-hearse-cum-votemobile, that every five years or so suddenly does the rounds of Malta and Gozo, thoughtfully transporting all the infirm, the elderly and the moribund – sometimes complete with their life support systems – to make sure they manage to tick off their ballot sheets before ticking off themselves.
Yes, indeed. Every vote really does count.

But chatting to this particular voter in between one Stamperija phone-call and the next, I couldn’t help but wonder. How did the Dar Centrali Nazzjonalista know if he had voted or not? I mean that from a purely logistical point of view.
So from that point on, I put up my antennae and started paying attention to the little electoral details. Things like: ever noticed how many people tend to mill around the polling stations on voting day? It’s an infestation, let me tell you. There are the ones who take your voting cards, the ones who give you your ballot sheet, the ones who stamp it, the ones who cross your name off the electoral commissioner’s list… and of course, the ones who take note of your ID number while all this is going on. The fact that you have voted is thus duly registered, and somehow – most likely thanks to the same Information and Communications Technology that brought us Smart City and The Spy Who Bugged Me – the data is then transferred to the political party’s electoral control centres, which in the PN’s case happens to be “Elcom” (that’s short for “Elves in Command”.)

How? Good question, I’d like to know too. Do they wait for the electoral commission’s list to be packed into boxes and then follow the boxes to the counting hall in Naxxar? Or is there some form of telepathic contact taking place between polling stations and the political party headquarters? My guess is that both parties (I would be very surprised if either AD or AN have the resources to engage in this sort of thing) have their own different systems. The fact that the above-mentioned calls came from the Dar Centrali, coupled with the fact that they began early – before noon – suggests that the Nationalist Party, at least, is fed with this information throughout the day.

In any case, one way or another, ID card numbers soon come streaming in to said Elcom offices (let’s stick with the PN: better the devil you know, eh?), and from there, a number of things may or may not happen. One thing’s for sure. If you thought there were a lot of apparatchiks infesting the polling stations, there are a lot more “party volunteers” who are called in at election time precisely to cope with the enormous task of sorting out the incoming data. It seems they have to work on a shift basis all day Saturday and right through the night until Sunday. For one thing, receiving an ID number at Elcom signifies that the citizen concerned has already voted. This is important information, and must be passed to the Dar Centrali (I am told the two offices are no longer housed in the same building) immediately so as to avoid racking up an enormous phone bill by making a mountain of unnecessary “don’t forget to vote” calls. For another, it has to be determined HOW these people voted, too. And for this, there is apparently a database containing vital electoral information on every single voter on the Electoral Registry. Things like: Name, address, telephone number and… a code-number from one to five.
The code is intended to cover the full spectrum of voter preferences in 21st century Malta… from a purely blue DNA perspective, of course. From what I gather, it goes something like this:

1 = Nazzjonalist ippantentjat
2 = Nazzjonalist minghajr il-patenti
3 = AD (jaqq!) jew floater (x’nistghu noffrulu?)
4 = Laburist
5 = Laburist jinten

I don’t know exactly how this database originally came into being, but it appears to be the result of several decades’ worth of intensive espionage conducted by those tireless grassroots crusaders, the “street leaders”: one of whom is probably sifting through your garbage even as you read this fine specimen of outline conspiracy spy-thriller plot.
But the real work begins as each ID number is inputted individually into the database, and then matched with the corresponding code-number to eventually produce a fairly reliable profile of the election result. As you can imagine it is a cumbersome process – intelligence is after all a tiring business – and under normal circumstances the voting or non-voting patterns of the entire population will be known to the party by around 10 am on Sunday – just before the actual counting begins.

Among the statistics to be calculated is the non-voting population. For by the process of elimination, as the polling stations close at 10pm (11pm, this time round) the ID numbers of all those who vetoed their vote will likewise become known to the Elves. The same principle applies, and because we are dealing with much smaller numbers (7%) the parties will quite quickly have a very clear indication of exactly how many of “their” voters stayed at home.

Small digression: Interestingly enough, the PN’s estimates for the non-voters was this year made public for what I would imagine was the first time ever. It happened at exactly 10.30am on Sunday 9 March, before the count proper had even begun. One local blogspot published the fact that 52% of non-voters were Nationalist, and 48% Labour, claiming that: “Those who didn’t turn up to vote are ‘traditional’ supporters of both the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party. This information became available to both political parties over the course of the night as identity card records were checked...”
The website is www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com, and guess what? Its creator/moderator is NOT a “PN groupie”. Got that? Good.

By this point you might be wondering. If the above is true – I am the first to admit it is an approximation, but my guesses are based on very reliable indications – is it also legal?
Answer: OF COURSE IT’S LEGAL! And if it wasn’t, the fine legal brains that make up over 75% of the party currently in government will no doubt find a way of making it legal… and, oh look! They already have:
Laws of Malta, Chapter 440, Section 14: “Any body of persons or other entity not being a commercial body or entity, with political, philosophical, religious or trade union objects may, in the course of its legitimate activities and with appropriate guarantees, process sensitive personal data concerning the members of the respective body or entity and such other persons who by reason of the objects of the body or entity have regular contact therewith: Provided that sensitive personal data may be provided to a third party only if the data subject explicitly consents thereto…” (2001)