Updated 6.30pm with PN reaction
It was scandalous that the Prime Minister and the Justice Minister were not acknowledging the crisis at Identity Malta and were not doing anything about it, Nationalist Party deputy leader Beppe Fenech Adami said today.
Since such individuals had different ID numbers, these people could vote more than once, Dr Fenech Adami told a press conference.
"This is a very serious case, an issue which touches the core of democracy, that one can vote once only," Dr Fenech Adami said.
It needed to be borne in mind, he said, that a sample of 300 people carried out by Identity Malta itself, found that 80 had more than one valid ID card. Some had three, Dr Fenech Adami said, referring to a report in The Malta Independent.
One person who had two cards had actually taken the ID number of another person who now no longer appeared on the electoral register. This was a confirmed fact.
And yet, incredibly, minister Owen Bonnici had said this was not the case.
In another case, a woman appeared on the electoral register with her maiden and married surnames and could, therefore, vote twice.
This proved a crisis at Identity Malta which the prime minister and Dr Bonnici were denying, Dr Fenech Adami said.
He said an exercise was needed to find the various permutations of persons with the same name and same photo, with different ID cards who could end up voting in different polling booths.
This, Dr Fenech Adami, was not the first serious abuse of voter registration. Someone at Identity Malta still needed to be held accountable for the way people had bought Maltese citizenship and ended up on the electoral register. The PN had found 90 such people and had them removed after court action.
PN candidate Herman Schiavone said it was unheard of in other countries that the identity agency was run by an election candidate.
Matthew Mangion, from the PN electoral office, said he was surprised by the Electoral Commission's silence over the issue.
'The issue doesn't exist' - ministry
In a reaction, the Ministry of Justice said this was an issue that did not exist and it had already described the newspaper report as unfounded.
"There is no crisis in the ID cards system, no sample of 300 people was taken, therefore it is not true that 80 mistakes were found," the ministry said.
It said the current ID cards system was sound and better than the system under the former government.