Colombia’s court has ordered the destruction of illegally copied electoral records that police made in the country’s third largest city Cali, reported local media Thursday.
Court officials in Cali of the western Valle del Cauca department ordered police to destroy all of the database information from the entity where it was illegally copied from.
According to Caracol Radio, the judge said the national registry will oversee and certify the process in order to guarantee the database containing the electoral records is erased in a secure manner.
National Registry Director Jin Anthony Cotrino Sossa indicated that he “expects the police to ensure a suitable technique, so that no information is copied elsewhere; to copy the data takes a matter of seconds and the information has been in power of the police for more than a month.”
The material had been illegally removed August 9 during a national police raid to gather information for an investigation into alleged election irregularities in Valle del Cauca. According to the entity, the policemen removed two hard-drives containing personal information of 31 million voters from the Registry Offices to the Cyber Police Division.
Sossa had lodged a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office several days after the information was stolen saying that “high impact” information including biographical, residential and fingerprint details of citizens, along with information pertaining to membership of the armed forces and police, was removed from the Registry without the appropriate warrant.
