An urgent investigation is required into what took place during the early voting day last Saturday.

It was recently revealed that two prisoners who were not meant to be allowed to vote, are on the electoral register.

Darren Debono, known as ‘it-Topo’, is one of the prisoners who has been allowed to vote in the general election this year despite being interdicted from doing so by the courts. Debono is a convicted bank robber, having pleaded guilty to his involvement in the failed 2010 HSBC heist and being sentenced to a decade in prison.

It was also reported that Pierre Cremona – who was sentenced to seven years and a half in prison for trafficking heroin in 2016 – had been allowed to vote when early voting opened also.

As per the Constitution, any person who has been sentenced to more than 12 months in prison for a crime should not be allowed to vote. The electoral register that was published in February includes both Debono and Cremona.

This requires an immediate investigation. If there are two, there are probably more.

The Electoral Commission said that it relies on various sources to keep the registry up to date, and cannot remove a voter from the registry, or add new voters, if the strict requirements and procedures set out in the Electoral Law are not followed.

The Electoral commission is responsible for the Electoral Register and thus needs to take ownership of the issue.

The Commission also said that public servants are obliged to provide the Commission with any information requested to determine whether someone can vote. The Commission said it always acted according to such reports from public servants. This statement basically implies that some public servants did not do their job, and on such a serious issue, this merits immediate termination from their jobs.

The Commission saying that the Electoral Register is ‘substantially correct’ does not provide any peace of mind. Such a statement opens the way for interpretations that there are many mistakes in the voting register, and doubts creep in that people who should not be voting are in fact voting.

An investigation is required into this whole scenario. It is unacceptable that people who are by law not allowed to vote, are allowed to, as that could raise many serious questions, and indeed already has.

PN MP Jason Azzopardi wrote on Facebook: “Is it by coincidence that prisoners with the exact same sentence but who are known to be Nationalist were not given a vote by the Electoral Commission?” PN MP Karol Aquilina followed this up by saying that they were allowed to vote thanks to the court registrar appointed by Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis.

An election is the most important time in a democracy, and if there are any questions that emerge such as the above, they must be treated with the utmost importance. The authorities need to get cracking on this issue, and fast.

Yesterday, more information began to leak about voting practices. TV host Peppi Azzopardi complained that his elderly mother, a dementia sufferer, had been taken to a polling booth to vote during the early voting phase of this election without the family being notified.

He said his mother’s stage of dementia results in her not even recognising him as her son.

Does this act by those who took her to vote sound right to anyone?

Vulnerable people taken to vote without the consent or the presence of relatives also raises doubts as to whether they are being pushed to vote for some candidate/party they would not like.

On a separate issue, why is there a need for people to be taken out of hospital/elderly people's homes on a cold winter day to vote? Shouldn’t we have a system that allows them to vote in those locations?