Bogus ID card could have led to new voting document
David Darmanin Chief Electoral Commissioner Edward Gatt has confirmed that a recent case of identity theft could have led to the issuing of a false voting document.
He was answering questions by MaltaToday on recent case in which a woman, Mary Magdalena Sultana, was convicted for lodging a false police report which stated that she lost her identity card and had another issued in her friend’s name, but bearing her photo. She then proceeded to take a bank loan using the false identification.
Gatt admitted that the conferral of the identity card “could have risked the issue of a false voting document… However, one has to point out that in such a case, the genuine voter would not have received the voting document and would have been expected to report such an event prior to having another voting document issued.”
Gatt has now announced that new procedures will soon be in place to ensure that such incidents do not repeat themselves.
But Labour MP Michael Falzon denounced the situation at Evans Building “shameful”, and criticised Gatt for being “reactive, rather than proactive as he should have been”.
Falzon said he addressed parliament back in May 2009 on the lack of security on the obtainment of ID cards. “Labour had drawn the attention of the commission on countless occasions, but it had to take an incident for action to be taken,” he said.
“Everyone knew how easy it was to get a false ID card,” Falzon said, adding that it was “unbelievable” that the identity cards office had not yet renewed expired ID cards. “There are ID cards that have been expired for years,” he said.
But Henri Darmanin, the director of the Nationalist party’s electoral office Elcom, discounted the incident as “things that happen”.
“Irrespective of security measures, if people with criminal intent have in mind to commit fraud, they will do it. There have been cases of fraud in big banks, for instance, where security measures are very tight.”
Darmanin said that if a false voting document had been issued, the party’s internal counter-checking procedures would have identified the fraud.
Electoral Commissioner Edward Gatt this week met with Police Commissioner John Rizzo, who is officially designated by the Prime Minister for the issue of ID cards, to implement new checks in the case of lost ID cards.
“Proof of identity by the production of another official document – say a driving license or a passport – which both contain an image of the holder, will have to be produced. If such documents cannot be produced, or in exceptional cases there is for any reason some doubt regarding the identity of the person, the signature on his application form will be compared with the signature on the original application form. Given that these documents are archived, some delay in the issue of a new ID card may be expected.”
When an identity card is lost or stolen, the person concerned must report the loss to a police officer and take a sworn declaration. The person then has their photograph taken by the appointed photographer at the ID card office, and when he gives his ID card to the photographer, an image of that person is shown on screen, originally taken when he last applied for an ID card.
Gatt insisted that in the vast majority of cases “this is considered to be a secure-enough check to verify identity. However, in the case in question, the person concerned managed to disguise her physiognomy so that she resembled the original owner of the ID card and, to all intents and purposes, in this case no fraud was suspected.”
In an application for a new ID card, the applicant completes a form duly signed and has their photograph taken. “We are not aware of any fraud taking place in the issue of initial applications for a new ID card,” Gatt said.
Gatt said he was not aware of any other similar cases of identity theft occurring in the past few years.
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