By The Star Staff
State Elections Commission (SEC) Alternate Chairwoman Jessika Padilla Rivera says she does not rule out the possibility of filing legal action against the Center for Investigative Journalism for a report published on the voter registry.
Padilla Rivera said a potential lawsuit would be for “having had access to confidential and privileged information of citizens that is in the General Voters Registry.”
“The State Elections Commission is called upon to protect the information of voters in Puerto Rico, which is why, as stated in the report, the SEC did not authorize and much less share the document,” Padilla Rivera said in a written statement issued Wednesday night. “Clearly, Article 3.6 (4) of the Electoral Code of Puerto Rico establishes that ‘Registration documents will be considered private, confidential and only the registered voter, the Electoral Commissioners, the Commission and its official agencies or any court with jurisdiction in the performance of its functions may request a copy of them, when dealing with matters of a specifically electoral nature or the configuration of the lists of candidates for jury members in judicial proceedings.”
“Given this, it is reasonable to conclude that the result of the search that led to the journalistic report is questionable, since, we reiterate, access to the Registry clearly deviates from the prohibitions contained in Law 58 of 2020,” she added.
On Thursday, Padilla Rivera reaffirmed the veracity of information shared with the media in an interview a week prior related to the number of deceased citizens remaining on the island’s voting rolls.
“Regarding the number of files of deceased citizens, at that time [it was] just over 16,000, on which the Commission was working in order to exclude those who, in fact, were deceased voters,” the official said.
“In fact, currently, as a result of the efforts made to this end, the number of files has been reduced to just over 13,500, a figure that continues to decrease thanks to the work of the employees in charge of this task and the collaborative agreements reached to make the work more efficient and safe,” Padilla Rivera said.
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