Ms Maura McMahon:

I apologise to the committee but the power went out this morning in Two Mile House.

The Green Party recognises the importance of the leadership this committee is undertaking, the complexity of its task and the positive political transformation that its work will bring about. In particular, we recognise the challenges around the dynamic nature of technological innovation across international borders and through new platforms developing.

The Green Party would like to comment in particular on the need for an equal playing field for all candidates to get elected, especially those who have not been traditionally involved in politics and might not have the tech or plain language savvy to understand some of the issues around the non-statutory use of the electoral register that has been alluded to in the media recently. We advocate for a transparent electoral process that uses plain language to ensure appropriate access to the register for statutory purposes.

In terms of the party's use of the register, we have an outsourced data protection officer with in-house data champions. The electoral data are used for electoral purposes in line with GDPR and our party objectives, which are active participation in the political process, as well as informing, educating and involving the public in politics. The party does not currently maintain copies of unmarked registers. The party maintains two scanned copies of marked registers from 2019 and 2020. The registers are stored on secure EU-based servers and are subject to strict access control at HQ level.

Any use of the marked register is subject to data protection impact assessments, DPIA, as required by the data protection officer, to ensure that all risks associated with processing these data are accounted for and appropriately mitigated against in advance. Marked registers are used for anonymised voter engagement and personal data are not used. The identification of voter engagement patterns is used to optimise our party electoral strategy and success. We find that is dependent on party resourcing and data protection safeguarding. As a growing party, our intention is to utilise data for heat maps, for example.