(Oct 26): Strong leadership coupled with a mindset change is crucial for adoption of open data and data accessibility, said Dr Azmi Sharom, deputy chairman of the Election Commission (EC) Malaysia.

Malaysia especially had been integrating and accepting open data since the Public Sector Open Data portal was developed in 2014, he said in his keynote speech at the Data and Democracy: A Geopolitical Security Forum on Wednesday at Monash University Malaysia.

“These [open data] policies can truly take off and boost the freedom of information because civil service and government agencies might be more willing to make data accessible, rather than having to deal with individual requests,” he added.

Azmi stressed data will continue to grow and constantly change as technologies advance. It is important to realise why open data is important but also the dissemination of information as well as data has to be done with the underlying principle that democracy must be safeguarded.

On another note, Azmi shared that with technology advancement and internet connectivity, the number of voters jumped from approximately 14 million to 20 million voters overnight, as over 40,000 voters above the age 18 are registered automatically every month.

“The main issue here is the accuracy of the Election Commission's use of MyKAD (Malaysian identity card) data obtained. This data comes from the National Registration Department. In other words, we are end-users, not creators or collectors but the end-users,” he said.

Azmi also listed several problems with MyKAD data that the EC constantly faces during election season. For instance, not having standardised addressing systems, locality or postcode problems, generic addresses and ghost voters such as MyKAD numbers of the deceased still listed as active in voters’ list.

The Election Commission came under fire during the general election last year purportedly for selling electoral voters data such as selfies, MyKad details and other details such as house addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates and hashed passwords. Azmi, however, assured the audience that though the information could have been possibly bought through the Election Commission, only limited data can be accessed.

News reports stated that the information in the register included voters’ names, identification card numbers, polling stations, the district they were voting in, as well as which federal and state constituency they were voting in.

“The point to be made here is that the data source is limited. You don't get every single detail of the data. For  example, you have the name, you have part of the IC (MyKad) number, not the entire IC number. Don't worry if somebody's buying a mobile phone or your IC, it's not the full information. There'll be some news reports saying we put data on sale and they say it came from us, which is possible. It could have come from us. But a lot of this data has details that we don't sell," he said.

Azmi stressed that it is also possible that the unscrupulous parties may have combined information from other sources or actual hacks by cybercriminals.

“There's been investigations and we haven't found anything yet. I'm not making excuses. But so far, we haven't found anything. There are currently strong security measures being put in place to ensure this does not happen again,” he added.