THE Auditor General Department says that 10,459 electors who have died since 2006 were only recently removed from the voters’ list because the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) failed to use data from the Registrar General’s Department (RGD) over the past six years.

“We found that the ECJ’s dead electors processing procedures did not take into account any death data from the RGD as required under Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act (ROPA), Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis said in her department’s latest report to Parliament.

The auditor general found that instead of relying on the RGD figures, the ECJ relied instead on death notices published in the press and information from members of the public. But the auditor general admitted that since the discovery, the ECJ has sought death data from the RGD dating back to 2006, which has enabled the commission to remove 10,459 names from the list.

Under the Representation of the People Act, the RGD is required to provide the ECJ, every three months, with a list of persons over 18 years of age who have died.

This was among a number of key findings by the AG’s Department in its latest report tabled in the House of Representatives yesterday entitled “Information System Review Report of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica”.

Monroe Ellis also noted that the review identified several weaknesses in the ECJ’s information technology control environment, which were related to corporate and IT governance; information and system security; elector registration; and the production of the voters’ list.

She found, too, that the ECJ did not have an effective system in place to routinely verify the age or date of birth of applicants, and an analysis of the adjusted November 2011 list revealed that there were 48 electors without a date of birth.

The November list showed 133,845 electors with bad prints, bad photo or missing information, while another 3,137 and 2,922 either had wrong fingerprints or no fingers, but the ECJ did not have a mechanism to target them for re-verification to determine their authenticity.

The ECJ had no authority to review certain election documents, such as the Poll Book used to record the names of voters, because the relevant section of ROPA had not been amended, after the change of name from the Electoral Advisory Commission in 2006. Also, the ECJ did not have a comprehensive information security policy that defined management’s intentions on information security.

“There was, too, a breakdown in the monitoring and control system relating to the ECJ’s physical security, and inherent weaknesses in the access control software.

The report is to be reviewed by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC).