As the Cambridge Analytica scandal is still in everyone’s mind (see EUROPE 11999), the European Commission is at work to ensure ‘free and fair’ European elections in May 2019.
Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled a raft of measures in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday 12 September to guarantee a manipulation-free election environment. The flagship measure is already known – levying financial penalties on European political parties if they violate data projection rules to deliberately influence the result of the European elections (see EUROPE 12089).
To this end, the Commission proposes a targeted amendment of the 2014 regulation on the financing of European political parties, which it says must be in force before the European elections (see https://bit.ly/2NEAtNQ ).
The scale of the fines will be 5% of the annual budget of any European party penalised by the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations. Any European party found guilty of violating the rules will not be eligible for co-financing from the EU for the year in question.
GRDP. The Commission wants to ensure that the general regulation on data protection (GRDP) will be correctly applied by the member states and therefore is supplying them with guidelines (see https://bit.ly/2N6AtGN ).
The Commission says: "According to the preliminary findings, incomplete information on the purpose for which the data were collected was a key shortcoming in the Cambridge Analytica case (…) All organisations processing personal data in the electoral context have to make sure that individuals fully understand how and for what purpose their personal data will be used."
This ‘data protection’ aspect is accompanied by a recommendation on cooperation, transparency, cybersecurity and online disinformation (see https://bit.ly/2MojZoj ).
The member states are notably encouraged to designate a national point of contact for participation in a European network of election cooperation able to rapidly detect potential threats.
The Commission is of the opinion that European and national political parties should publish their spending on online publicity campaigns along with the targeting criteria used for getting information to citizens, or face penalties.
Cybersecurity. In terms of cybersecurity, the Commission expects the member states to take appropriate measures to protect the networks used for voter and candidate registration, vote processing and counting, and publication and communication of the election results to the general public.
The Commission has also put on the table a draft regulation on the creation of a network of cybersecurity skills centres for better coordinating financing available for cooperation, research and innovation in the domain of cybersecurity (see https://bit.ly/2CKhsFk ).
On Wednesday, another proposal came, this time from the European Parliament. "In the coming months, the European Commission, together with this Parliament should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate foreign interference intended to undermine European democracies", suggested the leader of the ALDE, Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt.
The Commission is planning to work on preparing common European responses to any foreign interference in elections in the European Union. Meanwhile, it is holding a high-level conference on 15 and 16 October on election threats linked to cyber-democracy. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)