User:Mindmatrix/Skunkworks/Permanent Register of Electors for Ontario

The Permanent Register of Electors for Ontario (PREO) is a database of electors for the province of Ontario, Canada. It is maintained by Elections Ontario, and contains data about electors eligible to vote in provincial and municipal elections in the province.

Background
Before the 1990s, the government assumed responsibility for ensuring that every eligible elector was registered for each electoral event.

In March 1996, a working group was established for the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing for the Government of Canada. It issued the report "The Register of Electors Project: A Report on Research and feasibility", which included amongst its recommendations the creation of the National Register of Electors. This required changes to the Canada Elections Act and the Income Tax Act. The report also stated that there was support for integration of provincial and territorial electoral registers with the national register. In 1998, the Ontario Election Act was amended to create the Permanent Register of Electors for Ontario.

Data
Information stored in the PREO is derived from many sources, including the National Register of Electors maintained by Elections Canada, driver's licence records held by the Ministry of Transportation, and tax records held by the Canada Revenue Agency.

Synchronizing data from disparate sources has led to documented inconsistencies, such as individuals who have changed their name having two entries in the database.

Ontario residents may opt to prevent data stored in the Permanent Register of Electors for Ontario from being sent to other parties that are normally allowed to use the data, such as the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, or to Elections Canada for integration into the National Register of Electors. It will not result in the expunction of data about that elector already contained in external databases.

Data from the PREO is used to compile the List of Electors for every provincial electoral event and the Municipal Preliminary List of Electors for electoral events for each municipality in the province, the latter of which is used to create the Municipal Voters' List.

Breaches
Following the 2011 Ontario election, Elections Ontario undertook a project to update the PREO based on information gathered during the election. This work was performed off-site on a system not connected to Elections Ontario, necessitating a means to transfer the data between the two systems; this was done using USB flash drives. On 26 April 2012, two unencrypted flash drives were determined to be missing, and were never found despite an investigation by Elections Ontario, a private investigation company, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. The flash drives contained data of up to 2.4 million electors in 25 of the province's electoral districts, and included their name, address, gender, birth date, and whether the elector had voted in the 2011 election.

Privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian released Elections Ontario’s Unprecedented Privacy Breach: A special Investigation Report detailing the incident and making seven recommendations to Elections Ontario. Among the recommendations were for the agency to establish a Chief Privacy Officer, to train all new temporary and permanent employees regarding privacy, to retrain staff annually, and to hire an independent third party to conduct an audit of the information management at Elections Ontario.

As a result, today PREO has a "rigorous and mature privacy program" based on the privacy by design guidelines established by Cavoukian. Amongst its practices are to audit its headquarters and field staff for policy compliance, perform a threat assessment, provide training, and issue annual policy compliance reports.