‘This Gave Us Chills’: Maltese Voter Data Leak Accurately Predicted General Election Results
A data leak of over 300,000 voters and their preferences from a Maltese political party has been able to accurately predict election results, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation has revealed.
Back in March 2020, the personal details of over 300,000 Maltese voters were exposed as part of a massive data breach from a local IT company, C-Planet Ltd (IT Solutions), owned by Philip Farrugia, a former production director at One Productions, the media wing of the Labour Party.
At the time, Times of Malta had quoted Labour Party sources saying that the leak emerged from a Labour Party list showing the voting preferences of the population from the 2013 general election. An analysis by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation appears to confirm this.
“We double-checked our hypothesis by comparing the predicted and actual results in all four categories. We found that they are all statistically significant,” the foundation said.
The columns within the leaked database were quite self-explanatory, including sections such as “ID card,” “Sex,” and the individual’s voting district. The data leaked even included home addresses, personal mobile numbers and dates of birth of several Maltese citizens.
“There was just one element which was unexplained – a number from one to four was assigned to each person listed. We had good reason to believe that the numbers stood for each person’s party-voting preference, and tested that hypothesis,” the Foundation explained.
According to the data, one was attributed to the Labour party, two to the Nationalist party, three to Alternattiva Demokratika, and four to another party.
“We gathered the total figures and drew up the percentages for each voting preference based on the records in the data leak,” it said.
Comparison of Predicted Results vs Actual Results
As one can see in the above diagram, the predicted results appear to be incredibly similar to the actual results from the 2013 general election.
When the hypothesis was tested out across all four categories, it still proved to be statistically significant.
The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation and Repubblika have filed a court case against C-Planet, for breaching data protection laws in place, with more than 600 people joining the legal action.
The Foundation is also urging people to join their legal action, by donating to the Foundation or attending the next hearing of the case, which will take place at the Law Courts in Valletta at 1:15pm on 10th November 2021.
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