Remember the issue regarding endangered trees on Rabat Road, remember that a petition was signed by 8,900 concerned Maltese to protect them? Probably, as always, we have moved on.

The ministry responsible kept mentioning the 200 or so “citizens” who signed a petition in favour of the road development, and the sacrifice of the trees, but not even one mention of the petition.

Eight thousand nine hundred signatures have evaporated into what? Sorry, I must be mistaken, 8,000 signatories were approved, 900 were refused! What an awkward story.

Having come in contact with a number of “refused” petitioners, a very strange story emerged. Were it 10, 20 or 30 refused it would have been a normal shortcoming, but 900 would mean something else; a scam, an experiment, a manipulation of a “voting” process manoeuvred by a very competent entity.

Some days later we were tranquilised by a short and sweet parliamentary dismissal; it was a Google fault! But the story that these “refused” signatories recounted was very different and very similar.

Once they signed the petition, including their Maltese ID number and proper address, they were informed that there was a (minor) mistake in their application. They were instructed to go back to the previous page and correct it. They did that and found no such mistake; their ID and address information were correct.

They then pressed the affirmation tab to confirm their information. To their surprise they were met with a cheeky statement: you are cheating – you are trying to sign the petition a second time – your original signing has been cancelled.

Wow! This happened to 900 individuals. Certainly that would be a Guinness record in itself. Now one starts to ask questions. Google does not have my Maltese ID number or my “real” address. Google has been in this business for decades, it has developed fail safe methods of registering petitions.

Who is going to guarantee that our elections are not rigged and hacked, not necessarily by foreign hackers, but by local strategically placed ones?

You may not sign a second time on a petition because your tab would be blanked out after the first signing. Moreover, if someone was at fault, Google would never dare to give a cheeky reply to an assumed “mistake”.

Just to put things into perspective, this has been happening for quite some time. The Planning Authority has been experiencing similar “blockages”, with signatories being refused for a number of different motivations.

NGOs have been having quite a hard time challenging hundreds of PA applications that should never have been presented in the first place. But that is another matter. Still the Rabat Road petition has reached unprecedented levels of obscenity.

To start answering these questions one must decide who actually owns this personal information on the internet? The only authorities that have that precise information are Identity Malta and the Electoral Commission. Great! So what game/s is/are being playing here?

A major public authority, responsible for our voting system, would seem to be playing around, experimenting with means and possibilities of controlling votes and petitioning schemes. That is not a light issue, especially since we are now entering into a new phase of an electronic voting system that is more open to scams, infiltrations, hacking, and the lot.

Who is going to guarantee that our elections are not rigged and hacked, not necessarily by foreign hackers, but by local strategically placed ones?

A partial solution could be the manual checking of all the voting cards and first count votes. This is necessary and seems to be catered for at the moment. But what about the manual reassessment of the voting process when it comes to an end?

How can one check (if not manually) a process that may have identified anomalies and “false” results in the system. Is there an institution, body or group of authorised people who will implement such an investigation?

If the petition scheme did so “well”, with over 900 participants being excluded from the vote segment of 8,900, what percentage of participants may become excluded, without anyone noticing, in the election process?

In my opinion there are still other serious issues related to the numbering scheme. Has anyone informed or instructed how the computer is going to read such similar numbers as 1, 2 and 7?

Are instructions going to be relayed? Has a proper working estimate of how many thousands of votes may be declared null/invalid, because the machinery cannot decipher these different numbers, been calculated? What happens if someone wants to correct a number, could the rubber smug cancel the validity of the vote? Should he/she rather ask for a second voting paper?

Am I reassured with an electronic vote?

I have to say that I have many doubts regarding manipulation of the electorate and the same votes. The issues are related not to foreign attacks or hacking from the outside, but when things are manoeuvred and manipulated from the inside.

This is a serious issue. Our civic liberties and our democratic process depend on it!

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece